All right, I think we're going to get started. Good morning and welcome to the second day of our 45th Annual Institutional Investors Conference. My name's John Davis. I'm the lead payments and fintech analyst. We're excited to have WEX CEO Melissa Smith with us this morning. This will be a presentation, followed by some audience Q&A. So with that, I'll kick it over to Melissa.
Thank you, Jenny.
So, we defined our purpose last year. It's to simplify the business of running business. So we think about this in the backdrop of everything we do as a company. We're making sure that we're applying it internally and that we're applying it to our objectives for our customers. I'm going to spend a minute on this slide. So when we look at what we do, we want to make sure that we're solving the right problems. So we're looking at areas where there's complexity that we can remove. And it starts with having an underlying payments platform. So if you look across the company, about a third of our company are technologists. And those technologists are directed at making sure that they can create underlying technology solutions that can be applied to many different markets. And I'll talk about the markets in a moment.
We're also really focused around where we can create specific use cases for our customers and our partners that are enabled, based on the feedback we're getting from the customers and partners. So when we go through our product processes, we spend a lot of time around what creates toil for our end customers and where can we remove that that enables them to do whatever they do best, whether that's to remove a barrier that's going to bring on an additional customer or to, remove the threat of misuse in the underlying products that they have. We also are very focused around how we can deploy data. We had $225 billion worth of volume run through our platform last year. Attached to that is a tremendous amount of data.
The data is an important part of not just the solutions that we have today, but it's a really huge, important part of the solutions that we're going to offer in the future. And so this idea of insights that power success for our customers is on the back of a data and data architecture, that we're exposing to our customers in different ways across the different segments that we're in. So if you look at our business, I'll get out of the way of this. The places that we're really focused on are large growing markets. And so we've said we've got this payments platform. We want to expose it into markets that are big, that are complicated, and that are growing. And the three primary markets that we've picked are benefits, mobility, and travel/corporate payments. There are different problems that we're solving in each of them.
So if you're in the benefits arena, we're doing business with 20 million consumers, over 50% of the Fortune 1000, that are using our technology. They're using our technology for two primary purposes. The first one is they want their employers, at the end of the day, to be incredibly informed around the decisions that they're making when they're deploying the benefits or they're deciding how much money to put into a tax-deferred account, what type of an account should they choose. And the second component of that is the record keeping that goes behind the account types. So think of this as in your businesses, you're tracking different assets and have record keeping associated with that. We're doing the same thing. And an HSA account or an FSA account where people are making investment decisions.
We're packaging all that up so that you can understand what's happening from a record keeping perspective. So the pretty big moat that sits around that with the data that we're collecting associated with those customers, because that data can be used to make even better, more informed choices. The underlying technology is also set up in a way that it enables someone to have, if you're an employer like WEX, where we have a high deductible plan for our employees, and we also have a more traditional plan, you can actually offer many different account types sitting on the same technology stack with that same level of one integration point.
If you move over into this streamlining making receiving payments, the problem that we're trying to solve for those customers, and if you look at a travel customer, they want to be able to process a payment on a global basis. They want to do it in a highly integrated way because there's a huge velocity of payments that's happening across that portfolio. And they want to make sure that we're providing data in a way that their record keeping allows them to reconcile their accounts so that they can close their books timely. And they want to be able to do that around the world in many different currencies.
And so the moats that we have there, and we do business with 8 of the 10 largest online travel agencies in the world, is to make sure that that is happening in a highly reliable way and that we have the compliance structure on a global basis in order to facilitate a payment across many different currencies and many different geographies. It's also highly, highly integrated. And so if you look at that part of the business, very little incremental costs associated with adding new volume into that account. It's highly scalable. And then on the mobility side, the problems that we're trying to solve with those customers, they're typically companies that are moving goods as a byproduct of what they do.
So they could be a local business, which, you know, anywhere from the federal government to a local landscaper, all the way to a long-haul truck that's moving goods. And the problems that we're trying to solve is to use the data that we have to make sure that there isn't misuse, that people aren't buying things that they shouldn't buy, whether that's, you know, smokes and Cokes or whether that's filling up their family vehicle. And so it's a lot about control. And they want to make sure that, with a certain driver type, they want to make sure that the driver's spending as much time as they can on the road. With a long-haul driver, they want to make sure that driver's actually going to get the goods from point A to point B.
And so depending on what the situation is, we've designed use cases around that to make sure that they have the convenience to control using our data to facilitate those transactions. In that case, we do, we do business with 9 of the 10 largest oil companies in the world. So if you look across the business, and you can see this in the bottom part of this slide, we're going into the marketplace. We're big believers in a multi-channel approach. We think that we should have many roads lead to WEX. And those many roads include directly, where we're going into the marketplace and marketing directly as if we're WEX, and then through many different partner channels, whether that's an oil company or a financial institution or a third-party administrator or a broker, or a travel intermediary.
Across all of those categories, what we care about is they're going to use our underlying technology. We've had a really strong history of, of financial performance. You know, one of the things that keep in mind when I put these numbers up here, WEX has about a little over 20% of our revenues exposed to fuel prices because of the way that we're earning, revenue in our mobility segment. So last year, we grew 8%. We grew 8% in a declining fuel market where interest rates were increasing and there was a freight recession going. And so if you strip out the impact just of fuel prices and FX alone, we grew 13% last year. So really, really reliable, stable, growth model.
The way that we think about that is our growth objectives long-term are to grow the business 8%-10% top line and 15%-20% bottom line. As you get into each of these areas, the way that we're doing that, we want to make sure that we have an organic growth engine. We start with that. The business is geared to making sure that we're bringing in new business on a repeatable basis. Then we're supplementing that through M&A activity to get to our 10%-15%. Each of our segments have different growth profiles. We've got segment long-term targets. We've got it out there. Our Mobility segment, 4%-8%. We're highly focused in that segment around, really three things. The first, we want to make sure that we're bringing in new customers.
And so we have a very strong, proven, sales engine that is bringing in new customers on a regular basis. We've been highly geared, number two, to making sure that we're positioned well for this migration that will eventually happen into the EV world. And so, a lot of focus around creating subscription-based models that we've introduced into the marketplace so that when people are, using an EV vehicle, they are able to pick up that data set and integrate it with their ICE-powered vehicle. So that's the second place that we've been focused on our long-term growth targets. And the third thing has been continue to expand the product sets that we're offering into the marketplace. And we started with, kind of a narrow sliver, and we've continued to add it to that over time.
On the Corporate Payments growth segment, we've been focused on, again, how we can make sure that we're outgrowing the marketplace. The travel marketplace historically has had a high single-digit growth. We want to outgrow that by continuing to find pockets of spend with those customers that you increase your adoption rates. We'll grow with those customers. And then on top of that, outside of travel, continue to bring in new customers and prospects. And then if you go into the Benefits business, that business is growing organically at 10%, meaning that the market itself is growing about 10%. And then on top of that, we want to make sure that we're winning new accounts and bringing those into the business and that we're offering other products into that customer base. We've become a custodian over the last few years.
And you can see this wonderful shift that's happened as we've introduced a new source of revenue associated with that. We've added in capability and corporate capability and benefit administration capability and compliance capability. And so the ability to actually cross-sell into those customers leads us into that 15%-20%. I like this chart because it shows that in every year that I've been at WEX, which has been a long time, we've grown with the exception of one year. You can see that first year of the pandemic. But even including the pandemic in that period of time, we've grown 14%. So in that 10%-15%, long-term guidance range. I thought I had one more. Oh, thank you. If you look at us, these are the places when we step back and say, you know, why WEX?
We're a market leader in each of the markets that we've picked. It's really important to us that we've picked the big markets and markets that are going to continue to grow. So when we think about opportunity for us in the future, our opportunity is to continue to lead in the markets we're in, make sure that we're growing beyond the growth rates of the individual markets, and then continue to add to the addressable marketplace for new products. 80% of our revenue is recurring in nature. So it's a very predictable model. You can see that coming through for that revenue chart that we just showed. This network effect is really important to us because when we're out there adding a new customer, not only do we get high incremental drop-through for that customer, but we are aggregating the data associated with that customer.
You know, for us, we've spent the last several years moving into the cloud. We've finished our cloud migration at the end of last year. I talked about a third of our company are being our technologists. We're highly focused at the moment of leveraging that migration that has happened and the data that we have. We have 80 experiments that are live at this moment that just continue to expand in AI. We have an ability to go from moving into the cloud, making things much more reliable, to now increasing the speed of innovation and using new tools and technology to both reduce costs, increase the customer experience, but also rolling that out from a product perspective.
So that network effect, which has always been really important to us, is exponentially important to us in the world that we're in right now and their ability to compete in the future. And then we, whenever I talk to a customer anywhere in the world, the first thing they talk about is the WEXer that they are associated with. You know, it is really important to us that the person that they're connecting with is somebody that they feel is vested in the success of their business, and that comes through in spades.
All right. So we'll hop into a little fireside Q&A here. If there's any questions in the audience, feel free to raise your hand. But Melissa, obviously, especially for those that are newer to the story, you know, EV strategy for you guys, you've been really kind of front-footed and talking about it.
Maybe just double-click on that a little bit. You know, M&A, also, you know, how the unit economics look.
Yeah, sure. So I talked about the fact we have 19 million commercial vehicles that do business with across the world. Those are all different sizes and different points of this adoption. So you've got the very largest of the fleets that have some ESG pressure or have had and now actually have pressure on the fact they've made commitments and they have to follow through with them. You've got government businesses who actually have mandated and are making a migration through. And then you've got a bunch of people that I would describe as toe-dipping that are saying, "I want to try it.
Like, I think it might be part of the future and I'm going to order an EV and I'm going to understand what it's all about, but I'm really trying to really understand, does it make sense for me economically to make that shift?" On average, our ICE-powered vehicles, we charge $6 per vehicle per month. What we've said in the EV world, we will charge between $5-$20. And we're already in that range. And I would say with pretty limited product, we've been hyper-focused around the thing that we've heard from our customers is they're going to go through a migration. That migration is going to take quite some time because they're going to want to add in EV vehicles at the end of the life of an ICE vehicle.
What they're interested in doing is having all of the data associated with the mixed fleet bundled together so that they understand the total cost of ownership of their fleet. So they want to understand all bundled together, one invoiced, one data set on both of those. And so the products that we've been geared towards immediately have been making sure that people have access to as they're charging. We've created a network of EV charging locations, and made that easier for them to actually charge on the fly. We've created a home reimbursement model so that as their employees are at home and charging, we can reimburse them for that. And the next thing we'll do this year is depot charging, and that will cover like the universe of all of the kind of initial products.
So I would say we've got a relatively small amount of product that's in the marketplace meeting the, you know, people's immediate needs, and we're already in that $5-$20 per month range. And so we feel really good about the fact that we're able to go from a traditional model which was much more dependent on interchange, so a model that's just much more subscription-based, and do it in a way that actually is a creative economically.
Okay, great. And then, you know, you touched on the freight recession last year and being a headwind. Just remind us the mix of mobility between OTR and SMB, and you have called for an acceleration in the segment this year.
Yes. So how much of that's dependent on freight getting better, and just kind of what are the drivers to try that acceleration this year? Sure. Sure.
So if you look at our mobility business, about 60% are U.S.-based customers that return home at night. We call them local fleets. About 30% are long-haul. So those are out on the road in the U.S., and then about 10% sit internationally. And if you go across that of the way of this little freight recession that was happening last year, I would say, you know, as we've gone through the year, the migration that we think from our growth last year to our growth this year, there's two things that are, that are predominantly different. The, where we changed our credit terms, both for our over-the-road customers, we expected quicker payment terms last year. And then we instituted new AI-based risk models that were sitting at the front end of the credit decisions we were making across all, but more impactful from the local fleets.
That caused a 1%-2% increase in attrition, which should annualize as you go through the course of the year. So we need to make sure that we revert back to normal, which so far we feel really good about that. And the second thing is it changed, the economics of the fleets where our model is really based, acute-off profitability. And so what you saw in the course of last year is this drop in credit losses, but also drop in late fees. And that drop in late fees had a 3% negative hit to the segment from a mobility perspective, which should annualize also this year. And so what we also need to do is just make sure our sales engine, which has been strong through all of this, that that continues to be strong.
But assuming that that happens, that's how we lift from, actually remove some of the things that were holding us back this year in 2023, to no longer being headwinds in 2024.
Okay, great. I also wanted to touch on the recent acquisition of Payzer. Maybe talk a little bit about the strategic rationale and kind of the cross-sell opportunity there.
Yeah. So we have a 600,000, a little over 600,000 customers that sit in our mobility business. Great customers, sticky customers. About 150,000 of those are in field service management. And so one of our theses has been that, we believe that we can do more with that customer base. Payzer is a test of that. And so with Payzer, we bought a company that provides workflow management for field service management, categories. And we are in the process right now of cross-selling two ways.
Whereas we gave leads to Payzer and said, "Let's go through your normal model, just expose our customers to that," and then vice versa, where we were actually marketing directly to them to determine what, you know, what's the best outcome. And I'd say we're early in that process. But, like our thesis is to extend the capability. So, in with that customer segment, we would be providing right now to that customer the ability to make sure that people are purchasing the right thing for that vehicle, whether that be fuel or fuel maintenance. And what we would be doing with Payzer is, if you're a Payzer customer, what you're enabling is if you're an office manager, you can see scheduling activity or you can schedule through their software. If you're a driver, what you're able to see is, "I'm on my way to a customer.
It's telling me where I need to go. It's telling me information on the next job at hand. It's going to enable me to charge the customer on-site. It's going to enable me to collect from that customer on-site. It's going to enable me to directly order through an OEM the parts that I need to fulfill the job. It's going to enable me to bill and quote for freezer services." And so it's extending what we're doing into more of the workflow of that specific customer of ours. And again, like it's a test for us to see, can we actually extend that capability? And if we can, then we would want to do more of that.
Okay, great. Maybe moving over to corporate payment segment. Obviously, travel has been strong would be an understatement, but just talk a little bit about the sustainability of the rebound.
It's pretty clear that you're taking material market share within travel. So just touch on what's going well, where you're winning, why you're winning.
Yeah. So travel, our travel volume grew about 50% in 2023 from 2022. So, you know, huge growth. And so, clearly more than the market was growing. We were benefiting for two things. One is a migration that's happening in Europe where European OTAs are pushing more to receiving payment directly, with it's called the merchant model where they're actually taking money and then paying the hotels, in which case we're inserted in that transaction. And the second part has been what you were talking about is the fact that we're actually pulling and finding new pockets of share with our existing customers. And really that's just been, you know, working those relationships.
You know, feel good about the product and the product capability and about the idea that you can actually move payments through seamlessly to the end customers. And I think we've been a benefactor of that. What we gave guidance in 2024, we assumed that the travel market will continue will move back to a more of a normal state. So we'll still get some benefit of the of the trends we're talking about, but that you're not going to see this kind of massive migration that you saw in 2023.
Okay, great. And if you think longer term, you've got a 10%-15% revenue growth on that segment. You know, non-travel corporate payments was a little bit weaker last year. We did accelerate in the fourth quarter to mid-single digit.
So how should we think about what kind of travel needs to grow and kind of ex-travel corporate payments to blend to that segment, you know, 10%-15% growth?
Yeah, our goal is to have it not actually matter. Right? Like, honestly, if you look at our travel marketplace long-term growth, this tends to be high single-digit. If we can outpace that, then actually get that up into the 10%-15% growth. Then outside of travel, there are two products we have in our Corporate Payments toolset. One is an AP Direct product where we're selling into the marketplace both directly and through financial institutions. That has been part of what you saw: an acceleration in growth in the quarter, as that's becoming more meaningful. We actually built that sales force over the last year.
You're starting to see the benefit of that becoming a bigger part of our revenue number going into 2024. And then the second part is we that same embedded payments capability that we're offering to online travel agencies, we're taking that same capability and we're selling it to other fintech companies. And you can see that we've continued to build on the spend that we have there, but we also have a really good pipeline there as well. And so, you know, we feel like we're going to exit 2024. We're going to have a higher number than we did from a growth perspective in 2024, because of those two things really largely from a sales perspective.
Okay, great. Maybe we'll move over to Benefits. You're kind of fastest growing segment there. Some exciting stuff going on.
But maybe talk a little bit about what underpins that 15%-20% growth. What do you need from an account growth perspective? Just how do we think about it? Obviously, you're benefiting from rates now, but still even ex rates growing kind of in that range.
Yeah. Yeah. And I want to have a caveat because I want to make sure people hear this. Like we had said on the call last time that we're losing one customer in that benefits space, which is a Medicare Advantage customer, which has been a product that we've opportunistically been involved in, but it's not been a place that we've had a significant amount of investment. So that will affect our growth rates in 2024. That being said, outside of that, we're seeing growth. The market itself continues to grow.
And so account growth for us, you know, has historically been really strong in this space. We continue to think they'll have strength outside of this one customer. And then on top of that, we have become a custodian over the last few years, which allows us to then take deposits and invest them. It gives us a new source of revenue. So, if we continue to build that asset base, typically what happens with those customers is that over time, those deposits actually grow. And so the growth of the deposit base is higher than the growth of the account base. Spend volume is also typically higher than the growth of the account base because healthcare costs keep going up. And then on top of that, we have added other fund capability, and so we continue to cross-sell.
And so you kind of inch your way up into the range.
Okay, great. And maybe if we just pull it together from a margin perspective, obviously lots of moving pieces by segment. You've benefited from interest income and the benefit segment. But just talk a little bit about the cost optimization that you guys did and how we should think about kind of normalized margin expansion to kind of get to that, you know, 15%-20% EPS growth.
Yes. Yeah. The midpoint of our guidance actually had for 2024 was 15% EPS growth excluding FX and fuel prices. And so we, you know, we feel good about the fact that you can see that, the benefit of that going through in our guide in 2024, and you can see it certainly in our numbers in 2023.
So, one of the things we've been really focused on over the last 18 months is taking technology and applying it internally and looking for areas that we can create savings. We started with AI, adding AI-based tools into our risk functions. And you can see, like, clearly we've had a benefit of that rippling through, in terms of really not just reducing the credit losses we had associated with, but being, much more, focused around where's that optimal point of profitability. We've taken that same methodology and applied it in many different ways across the company. And so you can see the benefit of that from our operations centers.
So our call centers have been really focused around, you know, things that can deflect a call in there, but also using technology that enables that call center rep to answer a customer in a much more intuitive way using AI that sits in the background of that. So think of your call center rep. You're toggling through a bunch of screens. AI is going to sit in the background of that, helping them navigate that so that the answers are much more consistent. So instead of being individually driven, it's based on that tool. And it also gives us data that we can mine that allows us to then go to the front end of that and say, "Okay, these are reasons why customers are calling us in a much more summarized way." And so we can actually deflect some of those calls.
And so if you look across the enterprise, you know, even, you know, one of the examples we gave in the last call is claims automation where people are sending in explanation of benefits. And if all of you have seen your explanation of benefits, they all look same data displayed in many different ways. And so we're using AI in the background to read those. And so that instead of having someone manually process that, an AI tool is looking at that and actually able to collect the data in a way that just moves it through our systems much more effectively. And so it is a place that I get super excited because I think that you get the all these two first, you know, lower cost, better customer experience, you know, across the categories.
And so it's been a huge focus, and it's creating this flywheel of cost savings that we're using then to reinvest to do more.
Okay, great. Any questions in the audience? We got a couple minutes left. All right. Maybe, Melissa, I'll turn to the balance sheet and kind of capital allocation. Very healthy leverage kind of around 2.5 x. Just talk about priorities, buybacks, M&A. You know, obviously, you've been pretty aggressive with buybacks recently, but how do you guys think about it? And kind of where are you comfortable taking leverage to for either the right deal or just a larger buyback?
Yeah. So, you know, at WEX, we spend the first thing we think about is we want to make sure that we're hitting our organic growth targets. And so are we actually using the right amount of money internally? First.
Second, we have to at 2%-3% in our long-term framework for M&A. And so we've been really focused around and continue to be looking at targets that are going to help us there. And then there's three categories we've historically looked at. We looked at product extension, geographic extension, and scale plays. Now, I would say in the moment that we've been in, where our multiple is trading at a lower multiple than it has historically, we've been much more aggressive in share buyback instead of doing scale M&A plays. And I would say that's still true. In the moment that we're in, when we decide where do we want to deploy our money, we're looking at M&A, what's the return from a shareholder perspective, and we're comparing that to share buyback.
And so we've been leaning in this last couple of years much more heavily on share buyback, where if you look historically over time, it's been we would go do an M&A scale play, which has got a really high return and much lower level of risk.
Okay. I think we're out of time, so we'll wrap it there. Thanks, Melissa. Thank you.