Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today. We're excited to host you again. It's been 4 years since we last did one of these days. So we're happy with the turnout and everyone choosing to spend a little bit of time with us.
So I'm Steve Elder. I think I know virtually everybody in the room. And if you've ever listened to any of these calls or anything else, you've heard me do the forward looking statements a number of times. And so I won't do that again. We'll just skip right over those.
So just quickly, we're going to have 6 of the executive team members for WEX present today. So we're going to lead it off with Melissa, our CEO, go through each of the lines of business. And then, our Chief Financial Officer, David Cooper, is also going to present as well as Roberto at the end. At that point, we're going to take a quick break. We expect we'll be somewhere around 2 hours or so to that point.
Take a quick break, let everyone get a stretch to the legs and then, come back for some Q and A after that. So that's our day. And, without anything further, I'm going to turn the mic over to Melissa.
Good morning. I want to echo what Steve said, and thank you for coming today. And part of what I'm really excited about so as the company has continued to grow and evolve, one of the things that we've been able to do is really build upon the strength of our executive team. I get the privilege every day to work with a fine team of people who continue to grow the business. And just to give you a little bit of background on them, one of the things that I think is really important is creating diversity of thought.
So if you look at the background and profile of this team, so about onethree of the group that has grown up within WEX, so they've seen the growth trajectory of the company, About onethree came through acquisitions who've worked in highly entrepreneurial environments, and about onethree came from really big companies. What I like about the blend of that is you get a sense of very different perspectives. You add on top of that a very global perspective. Over onethree of the group was born outside the United States. And so we get to, every day, work to build and grow our business.
And it's been a real pleasure to do that. You're going to hear from a bunch of them today, but I also wanted to introduce those who are not speaking. So if you can raise your hand, Hillary Raskin, Ken Janacek, Nicola Morris, and Melanie Tinto. So we will all be here for Q and A. So if you have questions that extend beyond the group of people that are speaking, we are very excited to be able to respond to those.
So Steve talked about the fact that we were up here 4 years ago. And part of what I get excited about is how much the company has changed in that period of time. So if you look at the underpinning of that is we've gone through a very significant transformation, moving to be a broader fintech company. That's very intentional. It's been intentional for a number of reasons.
But the byproduct of that is we've significantly expanded our market opportunity. So when you think about the business end of the business now, we're now able to bring on business in the over the road marketplace, in the health payments marketplace. We've extended our offering into corporate payments. And we've extended our offering in a much more global way. So if you look at our growth prospects now versus then, our ability to grow the business organically is much higher now than it was 4 years ago.
At the same time, we're much more diverse. And that's been I think of that as our first priority was to make sure that we could extend the growth of the company. But the benefit of that is creating diversity. And 35% of our revenue happens now outside of fleet. And only about 20% of our revenue is impacted by fuel prices.
So if you look at the company when we first went public, 70% of our revenue was exposed to fuel prices. So it's been a very dramatic, very intentional shift. Again, the primary purpose of that was to increase the growth profile of the company, but the secondary benefit is that we've created a lot more stability in the organization. At the same time, we build upon our strengths and have been called a Great Place to Work certified company the last few years in a row. And I think that's important not because of the distinction because we always knew we had a good culture, but it gives us the ability to market it that way, Near and dear to your heart, at the same time, in the background, the company has grown market cap 140%, and we have hit our growth long term growth objectives, both in terms of revenue and earnings growth.
So it's been a very dramatic last 4 years, and we're excited to be able to tell you about the future. We set our strategic plan up a few years ago. So this really hasn't changed much, but I'm going to talk about it in a little bit more detail than what you'd hear on the earnings call. So this concept or our vision to bringing the future of commerce to the present, that's something we said a few years ago. What we wanted to make sure of it was we live in this world where there's rapid change.
And we've always been a very customer centered focused company. We want to make sure that we are bringing the best of what's happening from a technology perspective and from a market perspective to our customers. And what I like about this for us as we've continued down that path is we're now at this point where we have some of the largest companies in the world coming to us for ideation. And they're doing that because, again, the environment around them is changing rapidly. And because we've been able to show that we can bring new ideas to the table, we are at this intersection point where we're able to have offerings and conversations that we weren't able to do in the past.
The mission of the company, this idea that we're bringing together a payment technology and data. We said that's the place, the intercept where we think magic happens. We think it happens because we can create products that are unique by combining those aspects. And you're going to see a number of those examples today. And at the same time, we care a lot about how we do things, so how this idea that we keep the customer and the partner forefront in our mind, and our employees are able to work magic when we do that.
We think about our values. These five values are something that we talk about every day in the company. And I can tell you, this week, before I came to New York, I met with Shell. And when I talked to Shell about why we won one of the largest portfolios in the world, what they will say is, it's a combination of their sense that we are a partner that they can innovate with, the sense that we're the people who can execute and bring growth to their profile and the sense that we care about building relationship over a long period of time. So these things that are words on the page, we believe every day brings business for us.
And every day extends those relationships into other markets. So again, I talked about this in the call, but what I wanted to show here today is even more detail. So this is our internal view. So what I when I get on the call, I'll talk about points around how we're going to grow, how we're going to execute. How we measure ourselves internally is equally important.
So this concept of our long term growth objectives, revenue of 10% to 15%, ANI in 15% to 20%, that's also internal to how we think about things. From revenue perspective, we always start with growth. That's our first orientation. And we start with the fundamentals of every day, how we're building pipelines, how we're bringing in new business. We're highly analytical about how we think about deployment of sales and marketing dollars.
And as a result, you can see our growth engine that we build upon. And we target internally. We think about organic growth between 8% 12%. And that's our internal range of how we think about making sure every day, again, that we're bringing on new business. And every time we get on a call, we talk about names of new customers that we're adding to the mix.
And that's something that's inherently part of who we are. On the same time, we've been able to deploy capital to do acquisitions. And when we do that, we think about making sure that we can extend the reach and growth profile of the company, that we can continue to diversify the business away from exposures to things like fuel prices from the macro factors. And we've been able to show that we can take an asset and our organic growth and bring those two things together and build an even stronger trajectory. And I think EFS is a really perfect example of that.
It's a really large acquisition for us, and we found not just expense synergies, but revenue synergies along the way. And at the same time, execution for us is thinking about things and think of this in 2 ways. We think a lot about how can we build scale across those things that should be really scalable. And you'll hear that when David Cooper talks today, our CTO, not CFO. And then at the same time, we think about how do we create speed.
And that's another thing you're going to hear a lot about today. It's something I feel very strongly about is the bigger the company gets, the more important it is that we focus on speed because we need to be able to stay nimble. And a lot of the work that we're doing in the background, yes, it creates scale, but it also creates an ability to move quicker in marketplace for our customers. And then there's kind of at the core of execution process, this idea when we make a commitment, we follow through in the commitment. And that is true for us when we think about our customers or partners.
It's true also as we think about our investors. Now many of you in the room have been with us for a very long period of time. We don't take that lightly. And so we want to make sure that we're delivering externally as well. Leveraging our culture, I'm going to talk a little bit more about this along my path today because we became Great Place TO Work certified.
And we did that, again, as an external measurement. We knew our culture was good, but we wanted an external measurement of us compared to some of the best companies in the world. Where are we good and how do we create a feedback loop like we do in other areas of the company to make sure that we're constantly improving. What we were surprised about is we went to get Great Place to Work certified. We thought it would be a multiyear process, and we get certified 1st year out last year.
So 2nd year in, we've improved scores. We're getting almost 90% survey response rates within our workforce, which is amazing. And in this market that we're in right now, this is something we've done because we think it's the right thing to do. But in this market where labor is difficult to retain, it has become an even bigger competitive strength for us. Leading through superior technology.
So this is something we added in a few years ago. We always thought technology was a strength, but what we started to really think about is the market is changing really rapidly. If we want to take a strength of ours and make sure that we create the fiber in the company that shows that this is incredibly important and we are elevating it on a very consistent basis. And what we've been able to do on the technology side, we've got an internal scorecard of how we measure this. But we think about customer facing, we've been able to do some really great things.
We're rolling our product at an increasing pace. Those products are able to extend our offering. And as a result, you're seeing more and more business come on. That's kind of the fundamental that's happening. And in the background, you've got David doing a lot of work to make sure that we're also scaling that business, sharing applications more readily.
And internally, we're starting to deploy technology to do things around robotics and artificial intelligence. And so when I think about the future of WEX and our INTERCEPT technology, I get really excited. So again, across each of these, we have scores, we measure, we talk about, this is how we think about success as a management team. So if you look at the company, last time we got up here, we had $38,000,000,000 worth of spend. We were about $700,000,000 in revenue.
So in that period of time, we've doubled the size of the company, and we have made it much more global. So we've got this page up here, but I want to talk or let you listen to some of the words we have from our customers.
WEX has been one of the leaders in revolutionizing the way the travel industry works. When OTAs came on the scene, one of the really hard problems was the reconciliation between hotel providers and travel agencies. And WEX with the introduction of virtual card integrating payment information and speed of reconciliation has absolutely transformed the way the business works.
A few of the problems that WEX helps us solve through this partnership of ours is the fact that more and more customers are looking for data, technology, innovation.
We use we utilize WEX as a provider of our business partner basically because of the people that WEX represents. They're very forward thinking and they really kind of get our vision and where we would like to be with our fuel management program now and in the future.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch chose the WEX Health transact in those accounts and really making sure that they feel like they have the transact in those accounts and really making sure that they feel like they have the ability to control and direct and monitor what's happening within their HSA accounts.
The thing we enjoy most about the WEX Health COBRA platform is the fact that it's best in class. It offers features that really aren't available in a lot of other competitors' platforms. And it helps to give us a competitive advantage related to our COBRA administration and our direct bill administration.
The customer service that WEX supplies is just top notch. It's been that way for every year that we renew our contract with. I would tell you the second piece to that is data and data integrity. The data integrity that WEX brings to our clients is top notch as well.
You all know that we have a great financial model. That's part of why you're here. We have a strong reoccurring revenue base. We have high retention rates. We own a bank, which gives us a funding cost competitive advantage, but we're not a bank, gives us the ability to be much more nimble.
And at the same time, when you think about some of the words that were just used in that video, every time that I'm out meeting with a customer and I can say it doesn't matter what part of the world I'm in and what product I'm representing, The first conversation and narrative point is always around the connection that that customer has to the employees at WEX. So I always say that the foundation for us is the culture of the company. And that culture is largely about this idea that our customers and our partners are in the center. We have a very formalized process by which we go out and we look at our pipeline and we look at our product development pipeline. So if we're showing people the future view of what we're going to deploy for products, we do that with our customers and partners, and we get their feedback.
And at the same time, what that allows them to do is see the trade offs that we're making. They get to be invited into that process and understand that you're not going to get everything, but you're going to have the things that are most important. And we interject a very strong external view into that by looking at what's happening from a technology and a marketplace perspective. So we can take their thoughts, and at the same time, we can put in ideas of things that they would never have thought of and get live feedback. And we can do that in a much more dynamic way now so we can have this test and learn environment.
And you're going to get a live demo of some of those products that have resulted from that process. But so that connectedness that we have, that center of the customer and partner comes from the culture of the company. And then the other big unifying point for us, there's a lot of words on this page. All of these things we believe are our competitive strengths. It's part of why you hear us talking about winning business, and you will hear us all talk about winning.
We're highly competitive externals to the company, and we want to make sure we continue to win and grow. And these are reasons why the culture and the technology at highest level you're going to hear us talk about over and over and over again. And the technology for us has become about creating integration points within our customers. And those integration points make them able to grow their business more effectively. And at the end of the day, what we have learned is if we can help our customer and partners grow, then we by default grow with them.
And as a result, they bring us into other parts of the world, and we extend our reach and depth. And that has been our secret sauce, and if you will, and it's part of why we continue to win in the marketplace. Now another great fact is that we operate in very large markets. So if you look at the different market sizes, these are based on revenue on addressable market. So if you look at fleet, dollars 10,000,000,000 market opportunity, that market's growing in single digits.
Now we have been outpacing that growth dramatically. And you can see that resulting in some very significant revenue growth and market share gains. Travel and corporate payments, this market is split, and then Jay is going to talk about that in more detail. You've got a travel market that's growing in the high single digits, corporate payments growing at a much higher clip. In aggregate, again, a really big market, really huge market opportunity for us.
So as we continue to grow and expand our offerings, it's with this view that not only we're going to continue to pick up business, but we're picking up into markets that are already organically growing. In the health business, part of what we've always liked about this business, if you think about the versatility, you've got already a big market. This is U. S. Health, dollars 2,400,000,000 revenue opportunity growing, and depending on where you are in the marketplace, growing at different rates, but growing either way.
But it's also a market that health care costs continue to increase. There's a lot of stability in this marketplace. And so we think about our ability to diversify the business and to grow into very big markets. We like the position we're in. When we talk about our organic growth opportunities, it's because we believe in the size of these markets.
I talked about the fact that we have grown the business and doubled over the last 5 years, and that's our goal over the next 5 years is to continue to grow the business, double exposure every 5 years and reduce the inherent exposure that we have to fill prices, again, as a byproduct of that. So I talked about the power of WEX. This, again, is a little bit more of an internal view. So we think about the business, think about the scalability of the core of what we do. And so the portfolio risk and operations technology, corporate function, their purpose is to make sure that we can scale the business and that we continue to innovate.
And both of those things are very important to us. At the same time, if you get into each of the individual markets, we're solving different problems. If you look at Fleet, this idea of putting controls in the hands of our customers, it's inherently got people that are looking for efficiencies. And we are trying to embed ourselves in the operations of our customers and partners across the board, but for them the efficiencies around making sure that they're reducing their cost base. If you look at corporate payments, that efficiency is more about seamlessness.
It's the idea that they actually don't want to even know that we're in the background there. So we're attaching to systems in a way that they can continue to grow and scale their business and not even have to think about what's happening in that process. And so when we talk about taking complexity out of the system, it's taking huge amounts of huge trend. We've got people that are moving to consumer driven health care as employers are facing rising health care costs. As health care costs go up, people are pushing high deductible plans.
Those high deductible plans are engaging consumers in an effort to reduce overall costs. We have a benefit of that. And our products are geared, in that case, very much B2B2C. So think about the fact that the end user is a consumer. And a lot of what we're doing is making sure that there's ease of use and making sure that that consumer is able to be educated and informed.
So again, what we're doing in each of these cases, there's nuances. And the nuances allow us to build value props that are not just good, but really solving meaningful problems for our customers. But at the foundation of each of these, think again technology, think about integration. Those are important building blocks for us. You're going to hear from each of the people who run these lines of business today, which I think is super exciting for you to give another look, another level of depth around this.
If you look at our plans in the future, the idea that we're going to continue to grow the business, it's going to build off from all of these different strategies. But again, at the core of what we're doing is making sure that we continue to integrate further into our customers and partners, that we're solving meaningful problems, that we're working in very large order to enable all of that. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to the president of our Global Seat Business, Scott Phillips.
Thank you. Yes, sir.
Come on. Good morning. So I was asked to this is a little dangerous up here. I was asked to speak a little bit about my background. I spent the first 18 years of my life at Comdata, which is now owned by FleetCorps.
Then most recently was Studio OVFS, which was acquired by WEX, where we grew the first business at Comdata. We grew that from $50,000,000 to $500,000,000 in revenue. And then at EFS, we grew it from approximately $5,000,000 in EBITDA to $100,000,000 in EBITDA on a run rate basis. And that's continued to grow substantially. So as I look around the room, there's a lot of faces from my past.
And as many of you guys know, I'll do this for the love of the game. And I absolutely love Fleet Payments. We've been doing it for 27 years. And I anticipate WEX has all of the things that you need in order to succeed in this market. The first one starts with its culture.
Then it moves to its people. Then you look at the technology and the integration that we've built, the products we've built. And what you're about to see is a long runway for growth in our markets, in each of our respective markets. And that's commonly shared across all three businesses. And I think you'll see that as you hear from Jay and you hear from Jeff.
We share a lot of the common characteristics from a payments perspective with technology. Our infrastructure actually levers off each other, which you'll hear from Dave Cooper. So if everyone in the room could shake their head no quickly, I agree with you we're not just a fuel card. We are a fleet payments technology company. And I have the pleasure of explaining that to you guys.
And what I plan on doing is sharing with you how we look at the markets. We've had a lot of significant wins in the marketplace. I'm going to share with you why we're winning in our respective markets. And then conversely, what we're doing strategically in order to grow. And then just 4 key takeaways that I'd like you to share from this presentation.
So, 1st and foremost, if you look at WEX fleet by the numbers, we're as Melissa shared, we're approximately 2 thirds of the overall revenue of WEX, totaling greater than 900,000,000 dollars How we generate revenue gets broken into 4 categories. The first one being payment processing revenue, which think of that as fees which come from merchants. 21% comes from finance fees, which are late fees and revolving fees, where we extend credit. 16% of our revenue comes from our customers, where we charge accessorial fees to our customers. And then the remaining revenue comes from other fees charged across the spectrum, whether they're reporting fees, fax fees, etcetera.
So that's how we generate revenue. If you look at the market segment, there's 147,000,000 commercial vehicles. We didn't include China in that number. Today, we serve approximately 11,700,000 vehicles. So as what is commonly shared to me during budget times is we have a tremendous amount of time to grow.
So we only have 8% of the overall addressable market. In its basic form, there's a common misconception that I'd like to cure and I hope to do with this slide. First and foremost, we have a bank, which is a Utah industrial bank, which actually funds the operation. Nothing here other than the fact that it provides us with a low cost of capital order to be able to employ capital to provide all of us with a better return. The misconception that I'd like to just actually clarify is I want you to look at WEX like a network, very similar to some of the open loop networks like Visa and Mastercard.
But we operate a closed loop network. So what that affords us the ability to do is have competitive differentiation in our markets because we're not relegated to ISO standards or different standards that everyone must adhere to. We can create our own specs. We can create our own we have our own terms with our merchants. We have individual contracts with each of our individual merchants.
We issue process acquire and settle with those merchants and the timing of which can all be different. But what it really does is it provides us with incredible data and level 3 data that gives us greater control and security, not only at the point of sale, but back to our customers in the back end. So we're not running through open loop networks, we're running through our own networks and we are our own network. If you look at the basic transaction set at its simplest form, it says driver inserts card. Reality is, it could be a mobile phone.
It could be a telematics device. You're about to hear how it could be a connected car. But we enact the transaction at the point of sale with the merchant. We then do a pre authorization and authorization, of which it's that easy. It's a little bit more complex.
We do a lot of system checks in
the middle.
In the simplest form, though, we pay the merchant in 10 days, and then we receive payment approximately 25 days on average. And then you're about to see all the technology that we lever throughout the whole transaction that provides cost savings for the fleet. But it's in its simplest form, that's what we do. How we think about the business varies based upon the segments on the side of geography, closed loop, fleet size, markets and channels and products. If you look at the geography, I'm not going to talk a lot about North American fleet up here because I'm going to talk about it ad nauseam in just a few minutes.
In the LatAm marketplace, obviously, you've heard we've got the Shell Resin contract most recently. Asia Pac, we're mostly rolling out some major oils. In Europe, as many of you know, we carved a business out of ExxonMobil, which is now called WES, WEX European Services. We've just restored that business to profitability. And now we're looking at market expansion that's significantly growing the business through differentiation of the applications and the products.
I'd love to give you more color on that, but my friends in Atlanta are listening to this call. So from a closed loop perspective, we talked about the network, where we have network acceptance with direct connections and then connections through other applications to all these various major oils. We think about the marketplace from a fleet size entirely differently. So we've predominantly played inside of large, both in our over the road segments and in our retail segments. And we've got a very strong presence inside of large.
We've recently focused on small in both of our segments. I will say that inside of small and I'd love to share with you some of the differentiation, but again, this is a public call our small segment is growing at more than twice what our normal business growth is. So we have a significant emphasis on small, and we'll continue to do so. When you look at the different markets or channels on how we go to market, both inside over the road, think of that which buys in Truckstop, retail that which buys in Fleet. We do it on a direct basis.
We do it through partners, whether they're major oils, mid major oils, regionals. We've got a significant presence inside of leasing companies. And then finally, we have a government business where we were most recently announced that we secured the homeland contract. And then conversely, from a products perspective, we've got the various programs, which I'll talk about in just a few minutes. So that's how we look at the business at an overall level.
Winning is fun. We have massive momentum in every one of our segments, which has been very exciting. If I look at the Over the Road segment, I will share with you, when I joined at EFS in 2011, we had no fleets in the Transport Topics 100. As we enter into 2018, we have greater than 50% of those fleets in the transport topics 100. That represents, in the 500 plus truck segment, over 179% transactional growth.
And we currently have more than 25,000 units implementing in that segment. So strong momentum continues in the over the road side. Strong momentum continues on the WEX direct side. We announced 2 major wins as it pertains to the partner component. We now maintain 9 of the top 10 major oils.
We had significant wins with Shell and Chevron, as you guys well know. And we'll talk about why we've won those in the coming slides. So if I look at why we're winning inside of our WEX Direct business, it's really four reasons. But before I get there, these are all key wins on the side. The over the road guys came from FleetCor.
A lot of the Homeland Security came from Voyager, Verizon, Voyager. But why we're winning is really four key reasons. And Melissa shared it. It starts with our systems and technology. We run a distributed environment that allows us and we're typically competing against legacy mainframe environments.
It allows us to be very agile. In fact, Dave Cooper is going to come up here and talk. And the EFS and the over the road side, we actually rolled code every 6 to 8 weeks and what we called major moves and then we did weekly moves. All of those are customer enhancements to make our system better. Inside of North American Fleet or the retail business, we used to do codes once a year.
We're now doing code moves every 6 times a year or every couple of months. And with every one of those code moves, our application becomes better and better and better for our customers. Our systems enable us to have this strategy, which we call continuous customer improvement. In its simplest form, it allows us to engage from a sales process where we can walk in and ask, how are you doing it today? How would you like to do it in an ideal environment?
Let us throw some what ifs at you based upon things that we've learned inside the industry. We then go secure that client. And then if there's something that we don't do, we're willing to build it for them so long as we make it commercially available to everyone else. And so we've created a coat like following within our customers where they're helping us sell other customers because they want additional functionality for their customers or for themselves rather. And that's what we call continuous customer improvement.
We've also integrated our payment applications, where we're much more than a fleet card, as you're about to see, where we've embedded ourselves, as Melissa shared, inside the back office of our customers. Integrated payments in its simplest form means that our customers' databases are driving transaction processing at WEX. So when you think about something as simple as setting up a card, today or in the old days, what they would do is they would actually set up the card inside of their own systems, be it their own ERP application. Then they'd have to come over to WEX and actually set up internal at WEX. Now we've integrated those databases that whenever they make system changes on their own application, it's transparently made over on the WEX host.
So good examples. Let's say Schneider dispatches a truck from New York to Los Angeles. Scott Phillips is driving for Schneider. I just hired on. I've been working somewhere else.
They assigned me a card in their driver master. It immediately instant issues to me. It's activated. They put me on a load. They dispatch the truck.
The truck they tell me when they dispatch the truck, transparently coming back to me is the unit that I'm on, the trailer that I'm hauling, the temperature of the load. All these various components of the information are now transmitted to the WEX database. Why? Because now all of the information actually updates the application so that fuel posts against the appropriate unit for fuel taxes, advances post against the appropriate trips to allow the drivers to reconcile. And so we're using our customers' databases to drive activity.
We're also making payments smarter. That driver goes off duty. We automatically block that portion of the fuel card. The driver gets dispatched from New York to LA, that's shared. Determine the most optimal stop.
The card only works or the telematics device or whatever it may be, only works at those stops for that number of gallons. They want to get a cash advance. They request it through their onboard computer. We determine whether or not that the individual has run enough miles in order to receive that advance. So it's a highly integrated payments technology that databases to drive our transaction processing.
And what that does is it takes significant calls out of our call centers because they're completely automated in the back office. So what we've seen inside of the over the road business is a decline in the number of calls in our call centers despite the fact that we've had double digit growth. So the 4th piece that we'll talk about I'd love to talk a little more, but that clock is ticking down would be new product innovation. And I'm going to share a few tidbits of those with you, okay? If I switch to the partner business, again, four reasons why we're growing.
It's a different play on what Melissa showed you earlier. The reason it's different is it's the same thing we talked that she talked about, but the boxes are in a different area. It starts with the culture. We lead through technology. We have the ability to execute and we've been able to demonstrate growth in those respective markets.
If I look at that segment of business inside of partners, when they were on their own or they were with our competitors, they were flat to declining with no growth. Proud to say in 2018, almost all of our partner portfolios are up close to double digit. So what that is, is a proven growth story. So when you look at why people like Shell and why people like Chevron want to do business with WEX, culture, people, technology, ability to demonstrate growth and an environment of people that like to have fun, okay? So from a technology spotlight, when you think of the new product innovation we talked about, I'm going to highlight just a couple and then Kurt Theurling is going to go in-depth on the last piece.
But SecureFuel think telematics meets fleet payment system. Driverdash think enabling payment transactions using mobility and creating security. And then ClearView think data analytics meets Fleet Payment System. And so SecureFuel and it's and I'll go in-depth on these first two. SecureFuel, what we've done is we've integrated with the telematics applications with our customers.
Every 5 minutes, we're receiving engine information from the ECM that are updating our databases, whether it's fuel burn through the injectors, whether it's tank levels, whether it's geofence or GPS information. And it's dynamically updating our systems. What's happening is we're using that information to create controls for our customers to eliminate fraud and other things that may take place as a result of these transactions. Allow me to explain. So we receive the tank level every 5 minutes.
We're dynamically updating our limits and lowering the ability for them to purchase certain levels of fuel as we receive the telematics data. Additionally, as the asset pulls up to the pump, we've geo fenced all of our locations. When we receive a pre authorization, we can make sure that the asset is physically present at the pump. Conversely, when the asset pulls away from the pump and we receive that transaction, and let's say that we see that we received 100 gallons, we're measuring the tank level as the asset pulls away to make sure that he didn't fill up the tank behind him. So we're using data and technology in outside agencies or third party agencies that you're going to hear me talk about later in order to help our customers control our business.
And that's where we control SecureFuel. It does a number of different things, like actually looks at siphoning events and other things dynamically. But this is one example of a product that our customers asked us to develop and we've developed in conjunction with them that we've now made commercially available to everybody else. When you think about DriverDash, it's actually somewhat of a version of SecureFuel. Think about mobile enablement, where we actually use, inside of ExxonMobil today, the ability to use facial recognition on a phone to completely replace the card.
And what it does is it allows us to implement accounts almost immediately. And so, from this perspective, is we can embed inside this wallet that as your asset pulls into the fuel station, it senses that it's available. You select that you want to buy fuel. You then select the pump number that you're on, and it activates the pump, and then you dispense fuel, and it acts just like that transaction happened at the beginning. That's why I say we're more than just a fuel card, right?
There's really no cards involved in that whole process. And then I'm not going to spend a lot of time here on ClearView because Kurt's going to give you a demo of this live, which basically is taking all the information and then using that data to drive better behaviors for our customers. So customers today who may be buying something as simple as premium fuel, You're going to see Kurt give some examples of how we've been able to change the dynamic for our customers to make them more efficient. You're going to see that in real time using our data and technology through our data scientists and information we make commercially available to our customers, okay? So as I think about the business, and I came into the business after we acquired WEX, I looked at this and I thought to myself, what is it that we do?
And today, we've got approximately 480,000 clients with credit limits provided by a bank. So we issue and process and acquire all of our own transactions and customers where our bank provides credit. And today, it happens to be a tremendous amount of that volume taking place through fuel cards. So as I look at the constituencies that take place inside of our business, I really break it into 4, where I can see some significant growth. The first one comes from our customers, second one being our cardholders, the emerging technology partners that I just talked about and then our merchants.
So, from a customer perspective, we really want to leverage our scale and credit facility that we provide to our customers to be able to sell them more things using the WEX card. So we're going to our customers and we're identifying opportunities from a fleet centric perspective that are beyond fuel where I can now go to anyone that wants to sell products to the fleet marketplace and share with them I've got approximately 500,000 B2B fleet clients where I provide credit to them. And I'm willing to allow you to sell to them and market to them, provided you let them use my card as a form of payment in its simplest form. And we're seeing some significant success in that piece. Today, we're focused in 3 areas, cell phone plans, tires, fuel discounts.
And that's the non fuel piece that we talked about. The other significant opportunity that I see inside this is today, inside of all the different acquisitions we've done, there are different ancillary products that exist on each platform, one time use virtual cards, payroll cards, the ability to issue cash. We're going to leverage all of those into one offering so that we have one offering to our customers so they can take advantage of all the different products and services that we offer.
And so
we should be able to grab a significant amount of wallet share with that. From a cardholder perspective, we continue to enhance the cardholder experience through our new mobile apps that we've announced, again, with the goal of taking calls out of our call centers. But we have customers and merchants approaching us to do some dynamic couponing to those customers to when they enter their forecourt, it will drive behavior for that customer to come in and buy things. And then additionally, I talked about this with the telematics providers, but there are other emerging technology partners that want to gain access to that massive account base that we have that will provide our customers with better controls and services. Shame on us if we don't take a piece of their service offering for marketing it to them.
And then the merchants no longer become related to fuel merchants. They're also anyone that wants to sell goods and services to that constituency. I put this slide up here because we've had a lot of inbound calls about electrification. And I would say that an electrification of vehicles, thinking about EV and how it affects us in the marketplace. And I would say, right now, it's too early to tell.
I'd say we're in the 1st innings of this thing. We're working in conjunction with our customers. Candidly, don't have a lot of significant demand. But as it comes up, we'll work with them to provide solutions for that. In fact, we've done some of that by enabling acceptance despite the fact there not being much demand.
We'll continue to look for new partners to provide acceptance. But this chart represents an OPEC look at EV, alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles. 1st and foremost, it's well outside of your investing criteria. But if you look at 2017 to 2,040, the conventional marketplace still continues to grow and outpace. EV starts to gain a little bit of traction and momentum, but it's fairly far off.
And when we talk to our customers and those that are visiting, you got to think, we got visibility into a lot of different places. We have visibility into major oils, engine manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, truck manufacturers. And we view it outside of your investing horizon. But despite that, we will work with our customers to ensure that we're providing our best offering out in the marketplace as it exists. And I'm happy to give them I'm up on time.
I'm happy to take questions on that after. Really, 4 key takeaways that I'd like you to take away from this segment inside of Fleet. We have a differentiated offer from a payment solution to our customers, and that's why we're winning and we'll continue to win. We so new customer acquisition will continue. We will see we do have as you saw inside of the footprint, we do have a significant runway for new customer acquisition and a nice pipeline associated with it.
When you think about nonfuel and other products that we have, we have a nice ability to grow wallet share inside of our segment. And then from an international perspective, we're just touching the surface to that and we feel like we can continue to expand our offering, not only through our existing customers, but also through new customer acquisition and new partnership. That's it for me. Now I'd like to transition over to J. Dearborn.
Thank you.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Jay Dearborn. I am the President of WEX Corporate Payments. Similar to Scott, I'm new to this stage and to all of you.
So Melissa asked me to do a little bit of an introduction. I've been at WEX for the past 3 years, just coming up on my 3 year anniversary. I took over WEX Corporate Payments, which is a new division, and I'll tell you a little bit about that about a year ago. Prior to that, I was Head of Strategy so that everything Melissa was talking about at the intro of this session was near and dear to my heart. I joined WEX from McKinsey and Company, so I was a partner at McKinsey, spent 8 years at McKinsey, about half of my time here in North America, half of my time overseas, mostly in Europe and Latin America.
And then prior to that, I was at American Express. So I started my career in payments, working in both strategy and marketing positions at American Express here in New York and then also in London. That's a little bit about me. What I'm going to go through today are really 5 topics with you. The first is present a little bit of context around WEX corporate payments.
And when we talk about WEX corporate payments, there are really 2 segments. It's the travel segment and the U. S. Payables segment. I'm going to do a little bit of a shallow dive in each of those segments.
So I'm going to give you context, shallow dives in each of those segments. I'm going to talk about the underpinning product and technology that actually serves both of those segments. And then I'll wrap it up with what we're thinking about growth and the strategies that we have against growth in each of those segments. All right. Context.
Context is important. So WEX Corporate Payments, we created the business unit. It was about 11 months ago, and it really is at the nexus of 4 different assets that we had at WEX. The first is our legacy virtual business, and this is where our strength has been built over the past 18 years in the travel segment. It's where we've worked with many of the largest OTAs and other travel providers in the world along with WEX Bank and built that business.
We purchased AOC Solutions in its sister company, 3 Delta Systems, back in October of last year. And the thesis here was insourcing the technology stack that we had co developed with AOC over the past decade. I think of AOC and 3 Delta as 2 very different entities. AOC is focused on issuer technologies, so the core card management platform, whereas 3 Delta Solutions is focused on merchant technologies. So that includes remittance portal and Level 3 gateway.
The 4th piece of the puzzle here is with the acquisition of EFS about 2.5 years ago, piece of that portfolio was focused on general payables in the United States and how do you take the AP file and digitize that AP file, which really has been the base of our corporate payments business, the side of the corporate payments business and how we continue to scale that in the United States. Those four pieces come together to create WEX corporate payments. WEX corporate payments at this point is will process about $60,000,000,000 worth of volume over our technology, which is a big number. Dollars 35,000,000,000 of that $60,000,000,000 is issued by ourselves. Dollars 25,000,000,000 of that $60,000,000,000 is issued by financial institutions who are our partners in white label software, and I'll talk a little bit about that.
We have 3.25 people in WEX corporate payments, and it's very much a global business, with offices in Asia, Europe and multiple offices in North America.
I thought it
would be helpful to talk about the virtual card and how does the virtual card work with our technology. In order to bring this to life, let me take a travel example. So if you start at step 1 here, a consumer or a business books a trip with an online travel agency. We have a deep API integration with that online travel agency. In step 2, what they do is raise a card with our software.
It's a unique 16 digit card. It has quite a few different attributes. It has it rides on multiple networks. So we historically have had a partnership with Mastercard, and we continue to have that. And that will be very productive in the future.
But we've also expanded to have Visa as well. So we issue Visa cards, both domestically and internationally. And we just recently announced a partnership with JCB, where we will be their 1st virtual card issuer in Japan. And so these networks allow us to passport payments all around the world. Our software also has card level security features.
And so when that card is raised via the API, what we're able to do is lock that 16 digit card number down to one particular merchant, can only be used there. It can only be used during a certain period of time. And so these controls essentially minimize fraud. Right now, our fraud incidence level in the virtual card portfolio is 0.1 to 0.2 bps. It's a highly, highly secure transaction.
So that card gets raised nearly instantaneously. And then that card is given then to a supplier. That supplier has that card on file. The traveler then travels. They come to the Four Seasons in New York.
And upon checkout, that card is then charged. All the controls meet the satisfactory criteria. It's authorized, settled. We pay on behalf of the OTA or whatever travel customer that we have. And then they settle back to us.
That's the basic model. If I think about WEX corporate payments, the corporate payment side of the equation, it's very similar, but replace Traveler here with an AP file. So WEX spends $100,000,000 a year in general spend coming out of the AP. It's how do you take that AP file and then say, how much of this can be fulfilled via virtual card? If it can't be fulfilled by virtual card, how do I put it on some sort of digital rail?
If it can't if I can't do that, how do I put it on some sort of check rail? Very, very similar model. Travel, corporate payments. So travel business. Market size, so these are revenue numbers.
Market size we have for travel is 1,600,000,000 dollars Our issued spend in the travel space is in the high 20s of 1,000,000,000 on behalf of our customers. If I look if I switch over to Corporate Payments, the market size there, dollars 7,500,000,000 and that's a U. S. Number. We issue somewhere in the mid high billions ourselves, and those are the mid high single digits.
But we actually go to market through the FI channel as well. And I'll talk a little bit more about this where we have about a dozen banks that use our software, white label our software, and they are the issuer of their own volume. Currencies, 21 currencies. This is a massive competitive differentiation for us. The fact that we can issue 21 different currencies, the fact that we can pay into 2 10 countries around the world, very few can do that.
And then speaking of competitive differentiation, vCard endpoints, this is actually across both travel and corporate payments. We have a unique database of 2,500,000 unique records that are certified virtual card acceptors. And that number continues to grow. At this point, we have a merchant enrollment team of about 2 dozen, and we will continue to grow that team and grow this number over time. So let me do a little bit deeper dive on travel first, and then I'll hit corporate payments.
In travel, we focus on the online market. Travel online market growing at 9% per year, that's a global number. There are a couple of things where we find differentiation in the travel market. We have a very what I'd first say is we actually have a very privileged position in the travel market. When there's any if there's any large OTA or any large global travel provider, we have some degree of discussion with them at this point even if we don't serve them at scale.
We're really seen as the trusted name in the space. And that's built on the back of extremely deep API integrations with our largest customers. Everything at this point, everything that you could do in the user interface of our platform, you can actually do via the API, too. And so what's happened is, as we've built the business over the past 18 years, many of our largest customers have built their technology stack around our API. A couple of other things that I'll hit here on the travel side.
The effective elimination of fraud, this is a critical point. In the model that I put up there, that's called the merchant model. The merchant model is when the consume when the OTA or some other travel company swipes the merchant's card, and they then have a service provision to that consumer to pay on their behalf. The great piece of this model is it protects the consumer. They're not an agency simply taking a card and handing it out to different providers around the world.
And our model here with a unique 16 digit and all the controls that are on it essentially then protects the OTA who's protecting the merchant the traveler, and so that the incidence of fraud in this whole system goes away. Global acceptance through multi scheme optionality, again, another critical differentiator for us. And then global issuing in funding, whether that be through our bank or through various EMI licenses that we have around the world. There are 4 things that we're doing in the travel segment to grow. I'll tie the first and the third together and then the second and the fourth.
The first and the third, we over the past year, we've worked with our 20 largest customers to really understand their payout. So who are the suppliers that they need to pay in the travel industry? And so I equate this to wallet share. It's essentially the equivalent of a company's wallet. The deepest penetration that we have in any of our top 20 customers is 20%.
That to me is a staggering number. And it's staggering because how much growth that we have with our current customer set. And I tie that to unlock new travel segments. I find in our customer set, we have a high degree of penetration in the hotel space. We have good penetration in airline.
At this point, we have low single digit billions of spend that we issue to airlines, although airlines, I would say, is a key area for us to continue to expand virtual card usage. I also think about vacation rental, kind of the fastest growing segment of all of travel. Everyone thinks about vacation rental as I, Jay Dearborn, list my property on one of the sites for people to use, and that's actually not the case. When you start to dig behind vacation rental, you actually have agencies that are listing people's properties. These agencies take card.
They are cash flow constraints. They're reconciliation constraints. They function much like a hotel would. That's a second area where we're focused on. The 3rd area is car rental.
Car rental still dominated by paper processes around payment. New partnerships. New partnerships are tied to accelerate global expansion. We have the privilege of having a great footprint here in the United States and great penetration here in the United States and North America. We continue to expand in Europe.
We have about 50 people in Europe at this point. That team continues to grow. We see the pipeline being very strong in Europe as we take the model international. We have about a dozen people in Asia at this point, and we continue to scale the model in Asia too. That was travel.
Switch our hat to corporate payments. I'm going to tie these 2 together once I talk about product and technology. So corporate payments, growing faster. This is a U. S.
Market, whereas the travel business is a global market. This is the U. S. Payables market. It's funny.
So if I go back to my first job at American Express back in the early 2000s, we were talking about the digitization of commercial payments at American Express at that point. How do we kill the check? And I think the whole industry has been talking about that for a long period of time. These numbers tell me that the time is now. We do a survey every year in conjunction with Mastercard called the Payments Pulse Survey.
In that survey, we asked 500 senior executives and finance organizations here in the United States have they undergone a digital transformation on the AP side? And 50% at this point have said, yes, they have. What was staggering to me is the next question right after that. To those that didn't answer yes, do you plan to? And 45 ish percent either have already started a digital transformation on their payout or are going to embark on 1 in the next year.
To me, the time is now. The way that we do that, a couple of ways that I'll highlight. One is this concept of the full AP file processing. So the way that our technology works is we see all of the payments that need to be originated and sent. And then we are able to bump that data up against our database of virtual card acceptors and say, who will take a virtual card?
If they won't take a virtual card, how do you transfer that via some other electric mean? Or how do you transfer that by check with maximum terms? We're able to enable that through a supplier enablement teams that also make outbound calls. And then this last one is really important, which is we don't go to market solely direct. And we actually go through 3 channels.
We go direct, and here, we're focused on the mid and the large market. We have our software stack is really an enterprise level software stack. It's made for high amounts of transactions and ERP integrations. But we also go through 2 other channels. The financial institutions channel, this is where they have $25,000,000,000 of spend on our technology.
I look at the P and Cs, the key banks, the regions, the commerce banks, it's about a dozen banks. We announced American Express, I believe it is about 2 weeks ago. These companies use our technology. They wrap it in the look, feel, tone and manner of their corporate identity. But for all intents and purposes, it's a WEX technology that's powering it.
If I look at the partner side of this, I'll focus on Pay Clearly and Divi. Pay Clearly is a provider where that is hyper focused on the media space and growing leaps and bounds. What they do is they don't even white label our technology. They just access the API and then they can wrap it in whatever GUI that they want and marry it with whatever data they want. So it's essentially WEX payments inside the model.
Same with Divvy. Divvy focused essentially the Venmo of small business, taking the consumerification of payments and applying it to small business owners and the powering what our technology does is powers the payments engine behind that. So they wrap it in whatever they feel fit to wrap it with and use the API to get the payments functionality. Both of these are so important because it essentially takes our reach rather than dozens of salespeople going direct. It takes our reach, and I literally have thousands of salespeople out in the marketplace today through these 2 channels, financial institutions being white label white labeling the technology or partners going through the API.
Corporate payments growth opportunities, a couple of the areas that we're focused on and I'm already I've already hit on most of these. The accelerating through partnerships, if the time is now, it's how do you get as many feet out on the street to push use of the technology. Optimizing supplier enablement, this is how do you land particularly a virtual card because the virtual card is the one that creates the most revenue opportunity in this space. How do you enable suppliers to take a virtual card? And then leading with tech and versatility.
So that's what I'm going to end on here is what ties these two together is tech and product. If you contrast where we were in 2016 to where we are or we soon will be here in 2019, it's nothing short of a transformation around both product and tech. The core platform was outsourced. We had no microservice architecture. The payment modes were a single scheme.
We issue it and funded through WEX Bank. I'm going to hold core processing because I'll deep dive on that in the next page. What we've done over the past 3 years is at this point, the core technology is now in house. We spend double digit millions on the core technology every year pushing that forward from a capital plan standpoint. The UI, I'm very excited about this.
The UI is being refreshed Q1, Q2 of next year. That's in testing right now and that will be deployed. Microservices is rather than having one tech stack, we started to loosen the tech stack and break it into different services, services like bank transfer, credit management, the supplier network service that we have. These are independent services that are digestible by the whole ecosystem that we have at WEX. It enables us to tailor the offering to our customers.
So if I need to have a payables offering that needs access to the supplier network, it is its own standalone service that can then be called on. It also allows me to make changes far quicker in each of those microservices, so if I need to do enhancements. Payment modes, I've already talked about these. And then issuing and funding is a combination of Wexbank and our EMI licenses around the world. On core processing, this is one of those things that gets me very excited about as a payments professional.
Most financial services institutions outsource their core processing to a handful of tech providers, financial institution tech providers, And we're no different than that. We rely on 3rd parties to process for us. Process really is a combination of 3 things. It's the authorization, It's the settlement and then the statementing. At this point, we have developed and this isn't I say we have developed because it's out in the wild now.
We have developed what we believe is the 1st native AWS processor. And it has multiple benefits for us, moving account setup from days to literally minutes. Settlement happens one time a day, 5 or 6 times a week via legacy processors. We have the ability to settle whenever we want. We just so happen to configure it 6 times a day, 7 times a week.
This has a massive impact on credit lines and how much credit that we extend if I can settle more quickly. The availability is always there. If something were to go wrong, I just roll back to the prior instance of it. New bin creation. New bin creation is actually a key to being nimble in the marketplace.
If I have issues in acceptance in any particular country, I need to load new bins and new types of products. And that can be 3 months really on the best days. It can be 3 months via legacy processors. And with us, it allows us to be more nimble, where really it's a matter of weeks before we get the new bin loaded. I have no constraints around currencies, and this is important as we think about Japan.
And then the interfaces, we're going from mainframe green screen technologies where you need to have specialists who are trained to modern interface GUIs that are easily malleable by users. All of this is relevant to our customers. That's what this comes back to. It allows us to be reliable 100% of the time with our transactions. It allows us to be nimble in the marketplace.
So let me just wrap up with a couple of the key themes that I hit here on travel, corporate payments and the product in the tech stack. So in travel, again, we have a very privileged position in the travel space. I think the best compliment that I've had this past year running this business was there's a partner that we didn't serve, a global partner that we didn't serve. And the first time I met with the decision maker there, he said to me, I purposely held you last because everyone else I talked with compared themselves to you. And that's just a wonderful place to be is we're considered trusted we're not only a service provider, but a trusted adviser on how do you do payments en masse in the travel space.
So that's about deepening relationships. It's about creating new partnerships. It's about unlocking new segments beyond the hotel segment and then accelerating globally. If I switch over to Corporate Payments, here it's about how do you create the right partnerships to hit the market through multiple channels. It's around supplier enablement and how do we ensure that we can maximize the depth of virtual card usage in the AP space.
And then it's about the tech and the versatility of the product stack. And this last piece is it's really around creating enterprise grade, industrial quality payments technology that is not only used by us but used by many of our largest customers but then trusted by many of the banks here in the United States to drive their AP as well. Okay. With that, I'll give it to Jeff Young.
Thanks, Jay. All right.
Good morning. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate your time your support of our business. As I stand here, I had the good fortune to kind of learn technology and partnership. I grew up in a small ERP startup and then spent about 10 years at Microsoft.
And a couple of fundamental things that you're going to see through the course of this business is investing big, investing early and investing consistently in technology, and not just technology, but big time scale and big time usability and things like mobile are things that have transformed businesses that I've been a part of for a long time. And about 10 years ago, I had a chance to leave Microsoft and join a small consumer directed healthcare company, And we did that. We went in and we're very aggressive with the baseline of what we did for technology. We were very aggressive in what we did with mobile applications and usability. And that's something that fits so well as you look at the health care space that we have today at WEX.
And so today, I'm not going to be able to tell you that health care costs are coming down. I'm not going to tell you that health care is simpler. You've got CFOs and you've got HR execs who are trying to figure out how do I drive costs down. The reality of that for most of us in the room is more of those dollars are cost shared. So you have more dollars coming to you and the plans are more they're more complex.
And so not only do you have more dollars coming to each individual and each employer, but you have more complexity coming at you. I've got different account types. I've got different opportunities to save. How do I take care of that? And so what really creates for us is it's an opportunity where as we look to simplify the opportunity in health care and consumer directed health care and drive costs down.
And we drive costs down for 3 very important audiences. Our business partners, we drive costs down so that they can make money, and they can go invest and grow. We drive costs down for employers. And so as employers are looking to save money, we're finding ways to help them save money. And then at the consumer level, we're out there making it simpler, and we find ways for consumers to select money.
So as you think about our retention rate, which has been one of our strengths of our business over a long period of time, part of it's the technology and that usability, but a big part of it is the entire value change of partner, of an employer and consumers. They use the technology, they save money, and it makes life easier for them. If you look at the marketplace, it's $2,400,000,000 As you heard, it's growing in the low to mid teens. This is going to continue to happen. The cost of healthcare is going to continue to go up.
The push to have more things in the consumer pocket, more out of wallet, if you would, at the consumer level drives our business. And so if you think about what's out there, Melissa talked about it earlier, this kind of transcends some things in the economy and so forth because if you really think what drives us, think of the healthcare economy more than the other pieces of the economy. And so as health care costs are driven up, more things are coming out of pocket. That's good for the businesses we're in. If you look at the two stats on the left, these are important in 2 different ways.
The top one is, again, this year, 12 for 12 years, costs are going up about $1200 per year for a family and so again that's more and more in the family space and so the things we do for families every year that's a driver for more accounts and more dollars in those accounts. At the bottom here, this is thinking about your future. This is your retirement future. And so this is over a 4 year period. It's went from $245,000 to $280,000 is the average of what it's going to cost a couple to retire.
So when you're 65 years old, you retire. As a couple, $280,000 you need to save. This is a huge driver, especially when you think about health savings accounts. And we'll talk about a broad set of accounts, but health savings accounts are a big driver in the growth of what we do. But as you think about it, the top is this year, I need to save more money to pay for my health care for me and my family, and that continues to go up.
The bottom is when I think about retirement, I need to have a vehicle much like I've got a 401 ks where I can take care of my retirement. These trends are well underway. We're well in a growth curve, but we got a lot of opportunity to continue to grow. The basic account types that we serve, you know, you hear a lot about health savings accounts today with that retirement vehicle. It's also this is something that's broadly endorsed across the industry.
But we also cover flexible spending accounts, health reimbursement accounts. And one of the most important core things that we've got as an attribute is all these things are in a single technology platform, and I'll talk about that more when we get to the product set. But all of the account types, all of the different types of business processing we deliver is in a single delivered platform. If you think about what employers and consumers ask us for, if you think about what our business partners ask us for, can you give me more from one solution? I want more from 1 provider.
I want more in one technology stack. It makes it simpler for me. The way we go to market, we are very fortunate. We have the best set of partners in the business. And when you look at this, you've got health plans, banks and financial institutions, public sector, payroll and software providers, 3rd party administrators.
This is the best of the best. We've built this great technology platform. We go to market and say, hey, we can help you grow your business. We can help scale your business. And these are all things that these business partners look at.
If you think about it, in the health care space, people like UnitedHealthcare, people like Kaiser, people like the Blues of South Carolina and many more, they're looking for ways to tie very directly a consumer directed healthcare benefit with the plans they're delivering. So they walk into the market and say, here's the insurance plan you need, and here's how I tie it. They've got some great results. It's not really a surprise, but some of these people go out and say, Hey, I sold a high deductible health plan. My satisfaction dropped a little bit.
Guess what? If you sell a high deductible health plan and you give people a health savings account, your satisfaction doesn't drop nearly as much because it doesn't feel that different. So if you think about it, the first time you got a high deductible plan, many people in the room, you might have had a $2,500 or a $5,000 deductible. You really didn't understand that when you signed up for it in November. But flash forward to March when you have to pay $2,000 and it's $2,000 out of your pocket, Wham!
I don't like my insurance product as much. If you have a health savings account, your employer puts a little money in, you put a little money in, you show up for that first $2,000 bill and it's like, oh, now I know why I've got $1,000 here and next year that's why I'm going to save $2,000 And so, as the company saves money, huge opportunity for us to make a difference in how people run, and especially the health plans do that. Now if you switch from health plans to banks and you see people like HSA Bank, Bank of America, which you saw on the plan there and PNC, they're out there with a little different view. They're not tying it to their health plan. They're looking at it and saying, hey, there was a huge wave of money made in 401s, and I've got a reason I want to go out and get deposits.
And so some of these people are driving it as a 401, some of them are driving it as an additional deposit vehicle, but all of them are saying there's a lot of money that's going to be built in here, and I want to have that as a part of my financial institution offering. And so not just the core banks, but when you especially when you think about somebody like Bank of America with Merrill Lynch, it's an investment arm as well as it's a banking partners not only take us through a lot of verticals by market, but they take us through all geographies. And then if you think about Paychex, that's a terrific venue into the small business. And so we're out there thinking about simplicity, scale, repeatability and getting out to a lot of small customers. In addition to that, you think about scale at the bottom end with people like Paychex, over 50% of the Fortune 1,000 use a solution.
So we love the scale of being able to go up to the big enterprise at the same time we serve the small business. And so those things are strong. Together, 25,000,000 consumers, over 300,000 employers, about $180,000,000 in revenue, 15% of what WEX has done. And since we've gotten into the health care business, we've grown that business across the last 4 years on aggregate about 20% a year. So we're excited about where we're at in the marketplace and look forward to the results there.
We were challenged with a question coming in here is, let's go a level deeper in the product. Everybody's heard flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, health reimbursement. The challenge is, can we take that a level deeper and solve attempt to give you a view here. At the top, it's the distribution. So think of this as the interfaces that we give to all of those organizations.
Much like Jay described, all of these things were made available through web services. And so we've got some partners who they take our product to market, and all they do is put the name on it. And so it's exactly what we ship to everyone, and it's just a name change and a color change, and it's out in the marketplace. We've got other business partners, very large enterprise organizations who you never see our user interface. All they do is our web services.
And so we do all the plumbing and all the bookkeeping behind the scenes. And really, what you're seeing is our user interfaces in the market. So think of it as those different organizations have different needs. Our technology platform, because it was a built from the ground up SaaS technology platform, gives us a lot of scale and a lot of flexibility there. So at the middle of that is the WEX Health Cloud.
Everything is in a single platform, so it's high scale, high reliability, over 4 nines uptime across the last 5 years. And so this is something that's up all the time. And so when you think about going through these things, we sit with Bank of America, we sit with Optum, we sit with some of the toughest people from a security, from a fraud, from an audit perspective, and they make us so much stronger because to be their solution, we have to get through their controls. And so it's been a tremendous advantage, not only for us to learn but also as an advantage for all of our partners. If you think about the way we branch out, we branch out from that core, and we've got easy to use portals.
And so you can do everything, whether you're an administrator, a consumer, an employer. You can get access to all of the functionality. Again, it's all in one platform. Some of the competitors out there have 2 different platforms for a health savings account versus a flexible spending account. All of our things are wrapped into one platform and also one integrated debit card, so your debit card can do everything.
The other thing is, again, as you think about stepping out, our our mobile leadership has been a real driver for us. We went into this early. We built native mobile applications before anybody else did, and we've built everything for mobile. About 3 years ago, we went from, hey, you add mobile features after you get done to a release to we build our mobile features first. And so when you look at our mobile application, more people every year, it's gone up by over 100% the last 3 or 4 years.
More people use the mobile application than anything else. And it's been, again, great for our new customer business and great for retention because when you get it all into your mobile device, you don't want to change that. As we go out to the end, the other thing that I'd tell you is this private label and ability to customize is very important, and it's not real easy to do. Anybody can change a name, anybody can change a color, but what we do for private label is very different. So we have a big bank that can put their label and have a custom app.
They can go out to a health plan who's a provider for them. And at the health plan, we can put the health plan name and the health plan app on. The health plan can sell to an enterprise customer, a Fortune 100 customer, and we'll go out and we'll do their private label branded all the way through. So when you think of it, it's in tier private label. And the security behind that and the database architecture behind that is highly complex, and it's very hard to duplicate.
And so one of the reasons our partners love to stay with us is not only do they have the flexibility that they can be unique and they can be private labeled, but as they think about future distribution and future employee needs, they've got a way to have a private label all the way to the end and it's a powerful distribution change for us. The bottom here is kind of a product set. So you heard about benefit accounts. We talked about the core ones. That also includes things like COBRA and transit and wellness.
So as we add accounts, it's all added through that same system. The consumer engagement, and so the mobile application, the portals, personalization, this is a place where it's a lot of fun. When you sign up for a high deductible plan, we'll send you a message and say, would you like to have a health savings account? When you get to the end of the year and you spent $3,000 and you only put $500 in your health savings account, we'll say, hey, last year, you did this. Next year, would you like to put a little more into it?
So that personalization is very powerful in terms of how it makes value. Billing and payments, you heard one of the customer testimonials earlier in the video talked about that. That was a new market we got into about 2 years ago. As you think about the complexity of insurance just in general, you've got more and more things that consumers have to buy, you have more and more things that employers have to buy, The opportunity for us to take this to public sector and private sector customers is really strong, and we'll actually look at a case study of that later. And then finally, in business intelligence and reporting, we've led in business intelligence for our partners for 5 or 6 years.
We gave them the best knowledge of how do you stack versus other partners. It's one of the things we give them a report card once a year, and they love that to say, hey, how do I stack up in the industry view? We've got so much data that it really is a it's a very objective view of how you do. We've taken that in the last year, and we've moved that to the employer and consumer. And it's one of the things I'm most excited about in the past year is we've taken that knowledge of saying, how do you use an employer stack up?
How does your insurance product work? How does your health savings account work? How do you match there? And then doing the same thing for an employer. Hey, for my average situation, how much am I saving?
How much are these things costing me? And it's a powerful differentiator. So again, we move from business intelligence for partners. And in this last year and moving to next year, moving very quickly into business intelligence for employers and consumers. And along with technology, that knowledge is very powerful.
The business model is pretty simple. We're a pretty typical SaaS company. We get SaaS fees. We have interchange, and we've got some other revenue and some consulting sources and so forth. So we sit in the flow of a hub.
We've got about $15,000,000,000 of payments that process through. But really when you think about our business model, it's pretty simple. Think SaaS fees, think interchange from debit cards, and again, a few other things we do around professional services, high recurring revenue when you think about it, high ability to have retention and drive those things forward. We like sitting in the center of this. It's not only something where we catch a lot of payment flows, but we've got a lot of data and so we've got a lot of access to help people because of the knowledge we can bring to them.
I want to do 2 quick case studies here, kind of fun to show you how we can grow with partners. PNC Bank in 2015 was looking to replace their health savings account system. They had kind of outgrown what they had. They had grown a lot, and they were looking to expand in the marketplace. They went out and did a selection.
And at that point, we came in, and we did their health savings account system. Guess what? About a year later, people are buying more diverse insurance products, and they said, hey, I've got a limited purpose flex account that I need to do with my health savings account or there's some flex accounts that I want to win in the business space. Guess what? We turned the switch.
That system already had that functionality. And so in 2016, they turned it on, and now they're selling flexible spending accounts, and they're selling multi account software, which was so important to them. It cost them absolutely 0, took 0 days to implement. Fast forward, those two things are going well, and now they've built a product out, an ABLE account. So think of this as like a health savings account for the disabled.
And so PNC Bank said, Hey, we're going to start in Virginia. We're going to take this account for disabled in Virginia, but we're excited about potentially taking it beyond that. And again, it was something where it's all in that core platform. We've extended that with them, and it's a unique offering they bring to the market, and they've got a very nice niche. And it's a way that they extend in a very reasonable cost structure because it leverages that core technology.
And now in 2018, they're actually doing it again where they actually are coming up a patient pay option, which they're in pilot with right now with some great offerings in terms of how they can be even more into that payment flow. The second case study, the Vermont, and this is a case where we're in the public sector, and this is really a fun one. If you think back to 2013, this will be a stretch for all of us. This was in the middle of the accountable care work and this is a public exchange, which you haven't heard of public exchange talked about much recently. But this was in the heat of what do we do for a public exchange.
So we did the exchange billing for the Vermont public exchange, And this is a really unique way that our technology is so flexible that as they move, they still do exchange billing, but it is so different than what they did in 2013, and they've also been able to change it. And one of the things that we do is we're so cost effective. If you think back to 2013, you think about those public exchanges, you had big consultant firms doing $20,000,000 $50,000,000 implementation. I'll tell you this implementation was a lot lower than that, and it's a lot more flexible because once they got it in there, they're able to change it very quickly. And so now they do premium subsidy billing, which is for lower income individuals, doesn't have anything to do with a private or public exchange.
It's just it's a need they have in the state. They've expanded that now to do Medicaid billing in 2015, and they've done an overall integrated billing for everything they do in the state of Vermont for their constituents. And so this is really fun. It started in a very targeted way, public exchange. But because of the footprint, they're still using the same technology set to grow and diverse.
They've been a tremendous partner in terms of telling us what they need, and we've been able to bring them very cost effective solutions compared to what they're used to. But it's a good example of how that billing can work for others and also how we can work in the public exchange or in the public space. Where we've led? We've led in innovation, technology drives, the private label, the first to be on mobile, easy to customize, almost 4,900,000 health savings count, it's over 1200 plan designs, if you want to do it in the consumer directed health space, chances are you can do it on our platform. With that, I want to take just a moment to set you up on a demo.
We're going to show you a little bit of what we do in the mobile space. It's very exciting. But if you think about it, as you're out wandering around thinking about health care, most of the time, it's not what you're going to do. I'm in a different city. I don't know where to go.
I can check my mobile device to say, Where's the clinic? Or Where's the nearest Walgreens? Where can I go for work? I get that off my mobile device. And then when I get there, I want to keep using my mobile device to do the rest of the work.
And we'll run the demo and give you a chance to look at that. First thing we're going to do is actually start with investments. And so this is new investment functionality that's just come out this October. As you look here, you can get all of your balances, all of your graphs, the same thing you're getting at any of your investment features. I can come here, check my current balances.
I can look at my individual funds. Our partners now can select funds, so they can put whatever funds are in there. Some of our individual larger employers actually select their own funds. I can make changes here, so I can change my portfolio view. I can transfer cash to investment.
I can transfer investment to cash, really do anything I can. And then again, looking at my election balances at the end here. So all of these things, everything you can do in the investment platform is now right on your device. The second thing we want to do is give you that example of what's eligible. So there's nothing worse than not knowing.
So I'm in a store, I'm going to use the eligible expense scanner, and in here, all I have to do is take a picture of a UPC code, and it's going to tell me not only is it eligible or not, but it's going to tell me which account to take it out of. So this one, first item is eligible, and then I'm going to continue to do it. I'm going to look at another eligibility. It's actually going to say this one's an OTC drug. So again, it's an eligible device.
And then finally, I'm going to do a third example. And so if you think about this, the biggest fear people have is when they go into a store, it's like, do I have enough money? Check the balance on my phone. Can I use it? Okay, this item is not eligible.
Check the items before I go to the counter so I know whether I can use that health savings account card or not. And then when I'm done, I get done with the situation to upload it. This is all I have to do. Again, all on my phone. I create a transaction, type of descriptions I'm typing eyeglasses here, Eyeglasses and picking a date and then punching a button.
I put in the amount $50 and I take a picture of it and I'm done. The only other thing I have to do is I decide now do I want the money automatically sent to me right now or do I want to put it into my health savings account bank for the future? Our data set so I've told you the mobile device is so easy to use. I told you our usership is up over 100%. The other thing that is so much fun is our data set is growing.
Oh, and I want to add one more thing. We can also do it with Apple Pay and Samsung Pay as well. So when you think about the wireless payment, the mobile does that as well. But as you think about the close, our mobile transaction is moving double doubled its space, but at the same time, the data has doubled. And so that is people using it and using and using it, and the retention is just tremendous with that.
Finally, as you think about where we're at focused on innovation, we really look at delivering unique value through our partnerships, helping them with sales and marketing, helping them grow their businesses. We make usability simpler at every turn. We expand the offerings. We like the offerings. We've gotten that single core platform to date.
We're going to bring you more offerings in that space and then enhancing the experience, the usability, the mobile leadership. Those are things we're driving. We feel great about the market we're in. It's got good strong trends. And with the technology innovation and the teams we've got in place, especially on the sales, marketing and services side to back up that technology, it's a really bright future for the business.
And with that, it's my pleasure to bring David Cooper, our CTO, to the stage.
Thanks, Jeff.
So before I start, there's something you should know. And that's my wife is actually pregnant. Our baby is due any minute. So if I get a phone call and I look startled and I run out the door, there's not a problem with our technology. It's just baby Cooper on his way into the world.
And if that was to happen, I will hand over to Barry Driscoll, who's over there. I'll leave you in his capable hands. He's our Senior Vice President of Global Technology. So with that said and my phone is there. I'll watch it carefully.
So today, I'm going to talk to you about our technology landscape and what WEX is doing to differentiate itself in that landscape. Before I dig into that, I'll give you a little bit about my background. I've been in the technology space for over 30 years now in a variety of technology types of firms, start from early stage startups through rapid growth, through acquisition and then into some of the largest technology companies in the world. I've been in the payment space for a very long time, and I'm very familiar with platform consolidation and technical integrations through various mergers and acquisitions. Since my mandate from day 1 when I joined WEX was to execute against our technology vision to make sure that we continue to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.
What you see here are the pillars of that vision, and they boil down to scalability, simplification and transformation. The easiest one to understand is scalability. As you've seen already, we have tremendous volume flowing through our systems today. But this year, we're expecting to see at least 50% growth transactional growth against those systems. So we have to make sure that those systems can continue to perform and see the anticipated growth in the years coming.
The other aspect of scalability is as we are growing as a company, we want to make sure that we continue to move fast from a product development standpoint. So to that end, we introduced agile development to the organization in 2017. And when we did that, as Scott mentioned earlier, our longest development cycle was 12 to 18 months. Today, our longest development cycle is 2 months, and many teams actually go faster than that. And we'll continue to evolve this as we go.
And when we reach our end state, we're hoping to get to the point where we can actually do continuous delivery into our environment. After scalability, the simplification is the next pillar that we operate against. There are multiple parallel threads that this we follow for simplification. One of them is related to our acquisitions. Every time we do an acquisition, a new technology stack comes into the organization.
And with that technology stack, there are always best of breed examples of functionality or services. We want to be able to take that package up and then put that as a shareable unit for the rest of the organization. A very good example of this is the TAG microservice that Jay mentioned earlier. That actually came across with the AOC purchase in October of last year. Less than a year later, we've been able to package it.
We've had it it's now we've made it compliant. It's now resilient. It's running in a production environment and is usable by the organization as a whole. Aside from identifying the best of breed technologies and acquisitions, we're also following an aggressive platform consolidation and upgrade plan. And I'll show you some of the consolidations we're doing a little bit later when we get to the road map.
And then the final part of simplification is we want to make it easier for new technology products projects to happen and allow them to happen faster. So to that end, we're developing shared vision of our technology standards and tools and practices, and we're calling this our paved road. And this is a nice balance between responsibility and freedom. So the teams who operate on the paved road can go much faster than if they were to try to introduce new technologies themselves. And then the final pillar we're working against is transformation.
This is the most exciting one for me. This is where we are moving from being a product centric organization in multiple data centers to being a cloud centric organization with a platform of microservices. We've discussed microservices a couple of times already today. Very briefly, the benefits of a microservice. One is a microservice is you think of it as just a contained unit of something in its entirety, includes its data and the code all in one thing.
That means you can deploy it independently. That means that and also all of the microservices are API driven. So when you build a microservice, it exposes APIs. When it talks to other microservices, those APIs are used. That means our customers can also call those APIs.
So we introduce new opportunities to the marketplace. Because they're their own unique entity, it also means your system is much more resilient. So if any individual microservice goes down, the rest of your microservices continue to work, so your system continues to work as well. So you get benefits of stability. You get because you can deploy independently, that means you can actually deploy as and when you want to do it.
So the days of having to take a big downtime, deploy all your functionality all at once, then bring your systems back up are gone. Basically, we can deploy as and when we need it, and it will just magically appear for our customers. So that's the transformation side. So I've talked about the pillars. I'm going to briefly talk on some of the driver technology drivers that are that we're using to achieve those pillars.
The first and foremost one is moving to the cloud. We went cloud first at the beginning of this year, 2018. I'm sure you're all aware of the benefits the cloud brings. I won't go into too many details on them. But for us, the elasticity of the cloud greatly helps our scalability goals.
It also allows us to move much faster from a data center world. We literally go from months to minutes for many things for hardware provisioning, etcetera. We believe that it's a platform that enables newer types of functionality. Functionality is very difficult or costly to do in a data center. And a very good example of that is the next element down, which is data.
WEX has massive amounts of data, going back 20 plus years for 100 of thousands of businesses, millions of transactions per day and across our fleet, health care and travel businesses. So there's a lot of data there. With the cloud, we now have the opportunity to bring that data into one location. And then that opens up new opportunities for us, both from an analytical perspective and also from a monetization perspective. Data can become a strategic asset for us.
Earlier this year, we started what we're calling the WEX data lake. That basically, the data lake is just the receptacle for all this data. We're taking data from all around the world. We're putting it into one location. We believe the blake is filling just now, and we believe it's actually going to be useful by the end of this year, so a little while long from that.
And actually, related to the cloud, we started as I said, we started the project earlier this year, and we are actually just about to launch our first production product major production product into the cloud. Our international fuel card systems is moving has been turned on in mid December, so just a few weeks from that. And then the final element, as you've already seen in multiple times, mobile is extremely important for us. We're making sure that all of our technologies that we build are mobile enabled. You've seen mobile products for Fleet.
You've seen them for health care. We you saw the driver dash product. We mobile for us is not just phones and tablets. It's connected devices. And a very relevant connected device for WEX is a connected car.
And very soon, we're going to be able to show driver dash for the connected car. And if you remember, driver dash is the ability to remotely enable a pump from and you'll be able to do that directly from your car very soon. So I've talked about the pillars we're working on. I've talked about some of the drivers technology drivers that are allowing us to move. This is where we want to end up.
And there's a lot on this slide, so I'll walk you through it. At the top, you have our lines of businesses, so the fleet, corporate payments and health. And this is where their mobile apps and their websites and all their products reside. Off to the side, you see customer systems. All of these the lines of businesses and their customers all go through a common API.
That API talks to any number of microservices within it. And then those microservices have access to all of the data that WEX has available to them. And obviously, when you have all your data in one place, you have to have tight security and tight governance around that. We've already talked about TAG. So TAG a number of these we already have a number of microservices live in our environment.
On the corporate payments side, I believe we have 8 live right now. TAG is a very large microservices makes it sound like they're all tiny little things. They're not tiny little things, but they are insulated components. So TAG, even though it's a complex processing unit, is a microservice for us. So I'll move on.
So how are we going to get there? This is a we obviously have a very complex and detailed road map. This is a simplification of it just so you can actually see some of the major things we're working on and the approximate ordering of them. At the top, I didn't mention this earlier, but we had to in source all of our technology operations were run by a third party for us. In order for us to accelerate our transition and take control of our own destiny, we had to in source all of our technical operations back.
We actually we started that process early in 2017. We completed the majority of it in 'seventeen, and we wrapped up the end of it just a few months ago. With the bringing back of our technology to ourselves, we actually started on the cloud first migration. So as you can see here, the international fuel card one is just about to go live. Then we have a number of other ones lined up immediately afterwards.
On the platform consolidation side, what you can see is we do have a number of ongoing consolidation projects. These are actually going in parallel. The Fleet 1 platform is being migrated into what was our or what was called the EFS platform. That is due to complete in Q1 of next year. And then there's a number of other ones going on at the same time.
So you can see there's a number of platform consolidation initiatives underway. And then our next generation work on microservices is underway, and we already have some working examples of it. And what this does, once we complete the microservices layer or once the microservices layer is complete enough, we can actually start working on some new novel technologies, which I'm going to talk about next. So we pride ourselves on staying abreast of new technologies and making sure that those new technologies are usable for our businesses as and when they're mature enough. These are the 4 major R and D initiatives we're working on right now.
Blockchain, I'm sure you've heard of, is the underpinning of Bitcoin, and it can be transformational in the payment space. We also think it can be transformational in the complex supply chain space. So we have a number of prototypes underway in that. Machine Learning and AI, this has huge potential for the organization as a whole. We're at early stages in the journey, but we believe it can help with our credit adjudication.
It can help with our fraud monitoring. It can help with our call centers. It can help with a number of different areas. So having our data available in the cloud well, being in the cloud, we can actually start to take advantage of a number of new technologies that are out there. Mobile, I've already talked about, so I'll leave that one for now.
Other than to say, it's very important for us, and we're always looking at new initiatives on the mobile side. And then big data, we've talked about data a number of times. Data is very important for us. Putting it into the cloud gives us a lot of new opportunities. We did actually start on this path a number of years ago with our ClearView product.
And now that we have it in the cloud, but now we have data in the cloud, the ClearView product has a lot more opportunities open to it. I'm going to invite up Kurt Thierling sorry, Kurt Thierling, Kurt Thierling, who's going to give it who runs our ClearView product, and he's going to give you a demo of it.
Thank you, David.
Thank you, Kurt.
As David said, my name is Kurt Thearling. I lead analytics and data science efforts for WEX. I've been doing this for about 20 years in industries ranging from financial services to biotechnology to advertising. The one commonality through all of that is that data underpins all of those businesses, at least the work that I've done with them. Data has grown dramatically over the last couple decades.
And one of the things that I want to show today is how we have used data within WEX. We've been collecting this data for decades, as others have said. How do we expose that and provide that to our customers? And we do that through the platform that we call ClearView. I wanted to put this slide up because it's actually pinned to my wall in my office.
It is why we do what we do. This is Brandon Backus, a great partner of ours. He's worked quite a bit with us to make sure that what we do in terms of delivering analytics is meaningful. And in the past, we have provided data to our customers. We gave them as much data as they wanted.
They typically didn't want data. They want answers. They want insight. They want to know what we know. We've been running WEX for 35 years.
We know a lot about these businesses. Can we tell them something that we know that they don't? If you look at data, it's changed quite a bit. This is sort of the old school version of data. These are fuel prices across the United States.
If you were to get out of magnifying glass and look through here, you might find some patterns. California prices are pretty high. Texas prices are lower. There's probably not much more that you're going to get out of that. You may be, as a fleet manager, trying to figure out where you should be routing your drivers, where should you be spending your money, you're not going to get a lot of detail out of this.
How about something like this? As Scott pointed out, we have 160,000 accepting locations within the United States. We're looking at 160,000 data points, not 50. We're looking at every bit of detail that we can find within the data and presenting it to the user. You can notice, obviously, California is still expensive.
There are actually spots in Florida in the Keys that are expensive. Parts of New York, around here, gasoline is fairly expensive, too. But from this, can you discern more information about how to operate your business more effectively? And we'll actually go into some examples when I show you ClearView what kinds of questions you can answer that you couldn't answer before. The one thing that I will say that has changed over the last decade is the word more.
There's more data. There's more kinds of data. There's more detailed data. There's more complex analysis. And back to Brandon, he does not want to deal with all
of that more. He wants us
to figure it out for him. This is ClearView. We released it about 3 years ago. It is built on top of modern data science and analytics tools. The cloud is a big part of
what we do. We were the
1st application within WEX running in the cloud. Uses all of the big data buzzwords that you've probably heard, all the storage. We basically keep everything. That's good. It means you've got to work through it, but it means we've got a lot to work with.
And then finally, we're able to take advantage of modern machine learning algorithms. So it's not somebody poking through the data and figuring out what's going on. It's letting the computer figure out what's important and then surfacing that information to the customer. One thing I do want to point out is that although the examples here are in Fleet, the application of this platform and analytics and data science applies across all of our businesses. You can answer questions about health care, which places, which health care providers are providing the most cost effective health care in terms of corporate payments.
Along the supply chain or the processing of the payment in the supply chain, how can you optimize that? The same analytics that we use for ClearView can be applied in all of those areas. So this is what it looks like, modern, clean, pretty. It's very engaging. And what's important here is that our customers are given the ability to look at and understand their data in ways that they couldn't before.
This data was never available to them. If they wanted it, they would get 50,000 rows of spreadsheet. They didn't want 50,000 rows of spreadsheet. This is much more understandable. But then you can start to drill down into the details.
This is looking at transactions. And this is the spend versus the number of transactions. And as you would expect within a large fleet, most of the people spend about the same. But there are some outliers here. And what's going on with these outliers?
This is people who are spending almost $10,000 a month on gasoline, hundreds of transactions. You may care about that. Some of those transactions may not be appropriate. And I show one here, Elsie Hurt, and that's not her real name, so don't look her up on the Internet, has over $8,000 in transactions, over 100 transactions. And you're wondering, why is Elsie spending so much of my money?
Well, it turns out that Elsie works in the maintenance lot, and she's responsible for repairing a vehicle. And when the repair is finished, they go and they fill up that vehicle with a full tank of gas. So perfectly appropriate that there's a lot of transactions going on. But you also see a few other dots out here. They may not be appropriate.
You may have people who are stealing from you. You may have people who are sharing cards, not necessarily theft, but a bad practice. And do you want to correct that? How can you correct that? Can you look at this data and then reach out to the driver very quickly and easily to correct that behavior?
You can also drill down into detailed level information about where the opportunities are to save on gasoline expenditures. Here, I'm looking at I'm centered on this hotel right now in terms of prices of gasoline in the area. As you would expect in Manhattan, gasoline prices are expensive. And in fact, when you look at the red numbers over here, you've got people charging $5 a gallon, almost $2 over the local average. That's a lot of money.
You probably want to tell your drivers not to shop at those stations. There are a few green spots. Unfortunately, one of them is in Long Island City, so it's a bit of a hike. But there may be places that you could go that are closer. So what you want to do is basically provide this information to a fleet so they have it at their fingertips.
They can make decisions on the fly. Can you then feed this also to the driver so that they can make decisions very quickly? This looks sort of boring. It is sort of boring, but it's actually, I think, the meat of what we do. This is identifying all those drivers within a fleet who are wasting the fleet's money by buying premium gasoline.
For the most part, if you're driving in a counter line van, you do not need to buy buying premium gasoline. But you can be spending a lot of money on premium if you're not careful. The top driver here bought 1400 gallons and wasted over $700 just buying premium. What can you do about that? Well, you could take this list.
You could get on the phone and start yelling at people. And that, for some fleets, is the way that they do it. There's probably better ways of doing it. Here, I'm actually showing an aggregate a group of 26 drivers. The red line on the left is how much they're spending versus the blue line, which is the average price in the area.
You notice there's quite a bit of gap here. It's about $0.30 a gallon. For a large number of drivers, that could be significant. How can you change those drivers' behavior? What we do is we've built a system within ClearView that messages those drivers, sends them a text, basically.
We've noticed that you've been buying premium gasoline. It's against company policy to buy premium gasoline. Please stop. Within 24 hours, 84% of those drivers changed their behavior and stopped buying premium. And in fact, you'll notice that that red line turns green and actually goes below the blue line.
So they're beating the local average. So a little bit of interaction with those drivers is going to change their behavior dramatically. You're not going to change all of them. There are still 16% who didn't change. Well, you send a subsequent message to them a couple of weeks later, and you get most everybody at that point.
And as you notice, that behavior change sticks. It lasts quite a while. And we can do this not only for buying premium gasoline, just high price, bad odometer entries, possible theft, letting people know ahead of time that somebody's paying attention. The idea behind ClearView is that we want to take this data and surface it to the fleets and also change the driver behavior so that they're saving money. But as I said earlier, just as we could send a message to a driver about buying premium fuel, we could send a message to a healthcare consumer about an expensive dialysis treatment.
There may be alternatives nearby that are cheaper. And as we expand ClearView, we'll be looking at moving into other lines of business. So that's all I had to say. I'll pass it back to David.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kirk. Thoroughly. So as takeaways, hopefully, you've seen that WEXX's technology today is very robust and hardened. It's tightly integrated with our clients today through a series of APIs and other mechanisms. The newer investments we're making to move into the digital world increase the options from API.
So it will make our customers more sticky, and we'll get more opportunities to them. We are a long way into the digital transformation, and this transformation just provides many opportunities for us. And I invite you to come back 12 months, 24 or 48, whenever we next do one of these, and you'll see the difference that this transformation has made to the business. And then the final point I want to make is I have an amazing team. They have done tremendous work over the last 24 months, and I'm very proud of the team within WEX.
With that, I'd like to hand off to Roberto, our CFO.
Good morning, everyone. And again, thank you for being today here with us. I've been here already 3 years, almost 3 years will be in February next year. And it's amazing how the company has transformed on these 3 years already. My background was in consumer goods for almost 15 years, and I live in 4 continents.
But moving to this company with this high growth engine and diversification and all the opportunities that we have in front of us is very important. I want to spend some time on 4 topics. Number 1, we will review quickly the 2018 financials.
We will talk, which I
think is important to remind everybody the 5 years performance of the company. Then we will get on our long term growth targets. And finally, we'll talk about our capital allocation, how we deploy capital in the company. The other thing I want to make sure is I have 2 goals when we finish the meeting today. Number 1 is that you live with a clear message that we are why we are a high growth company.
And number 2, how we are going to get to grow. And the second thing is we have been performing very well in the past 5 years, and you have the commitment from us that we will continue to do so in the coming years. With that, I will start with the results year to date, so for the 1st 9 months of 2018. You have here all the GAAP numbers. Our revenue grew 21%.
And at the bottom, you have an EPS of 55%. What I would like to do is to break down the revenue by segment, but talk about how are we are performing on a like for like basis, which means excluding noise from fuel prices, from FX rates and also from the changes on the new revenue recognition standard. The Fleet Solutions segment year to date in the 1st 9 months has performed a growth of 8%. The travel and corporate solutions have grown 32%. And finally, on the health and employee benefit solution, the growth was 8%.
I want to mention on the health and employee benefit solution, the great work from Jeff Young and the team, the U. S. Health business has grown 14% in the 1st 9 months. If we move down to ANI EPS, the growth of 55% is very significant. Even if we exclude fuel prices and FX rates, the growth is still 38%.
So very solid growth so far, and we are very pleased with the performance in the first nine months. As we look into guidance, we gave a guidance a couple of weeks ago. And the story is the same. I mean, we are expecting to continue to perform at the same level we have done in the 1st 9 months. We expect total revenue to grow in the range of 18% to 19% and adjusted net income to grow between 50% 52%.
I also want to spend a couple of minutes to talk about what is this performance means when we exclude all the noise on a like for like basis. While revenue will be over 11%, and when we talk about ANI EPS, we would be between 35 percent 37%, so really strong numbers for the full year. And something even more important, and later, I will talk about our long term targets and Melissa talk about them too. If we exclude the noise of the tax reform, which was a huge benefit for WEX, the growth on ANI would be we expect it to be between 17% 19%. So very solid growth in the year, and we are very pleased with the results that we expect to end in Q4.
If we talk about what WEXC has done in the 5 past years, well, Alisa Gastaut, we want to double the company every 5 years. And you have it here. We have done that. And our commitment is as we look into the future to do the same. So you have the growth rates adjusted for fuel prices and rev rec.
Revenue grew on a CAGR basis 17.5 percent and adjusted ANI grew almost 18%. So solid performance in those 5 years, and you have the commitment that on the long term we will continue to do so. On the right hand side, you have the leverage ratio. Well, something that it was not that important a few years ago for us, but now it is. If you recall, when we closed the EFS transaction on July 2016, we had a lot of work in front of us.
And the reality is we closed at a 4.7 times leverage ratio. Here we are, 2.5 years later, we outperformed all the expectations that we have with EFS, thanks to the performance of Scott and the work done by all the teams. And today, we are expecting to close the year at 3.3 times. So great progress so far and a reduction of over almost 1.5 turns in this 2.5 years. And let's talk also about the rating agencies.
When we closed the EFS transaction, the rating agencies had on us a negative outlook on our rating. A year later, we were moved to a stable outlook. And on Monday, Moody's upgraded us to a positive outlook. So at the end of the day, greater leverage reduction, but at the same time, the rating agencies are taking that into consideration. So if we move ahead, it's great to perform very well, but also we need to continue to do so in the future.
As we look ahead, those are our long term growth targets. Alisa talked about them 10% to 15% revenue growth and adjusted net income growth of 15% to 20%. I would say all of them adjusted for the sensitivity on fuel prices and FX. But I want to get a bit more in detail on how we are expecting to grow. Melissa talked before about our organic revenue growth of 8% to 12%, but I want to give you some more detail for each of the line of business.
We expect on the fleet segment to have an organic revenue growth of 4% to 8%. We expect to grow on the Travel and Corporate Payments segment between 10% 15% organically. And finally, on the health and employee benefit segment, we are expecting to grow between 15% 20% organically. And also, of course, we will have some M and A transactions in the numbers. If we talk about ANI EPS, obviously, we are expecting margin expansion.
And we are continuing to work on the scalability of a WEX growth. And obviously, this will expand our margins. Finally, I want to spend some time on the capital deployment and on the capital allocation. We have 3 key areas or key pillars. Number 1 is the investment in organic growth.
I mean, the team has spent almost 2 hours talking about all the organic growth plans that we have on the table, and this is our number one priority for us. Number 2, we want to execute on a strategic M and A, and I will talk later about how we do what is the process on the M and A side. And finally, I want to spend a minute also to talk about maintaining a strong balance sheet. We have a targeted leverage ratio of 2.5 to 3.5 times EBITDA with the expectation that for the right transaction like we did with EFS, we will go up, but obviously, we will put all the resources to come back down to this target. And how we are going to be focusing to do that?
Well, obviously, the number one priority is how we can accelerate the free cash flow generation. This is very important because it will help us to reduce leverage ratio and at the same time have more resources to accelerate growth within the teams. If we get a bit more specific on M and A, well, we have 3 areas where we focus all the time. Number 1, we want to stay in the segments where we are today. And why?
It's very simple. They are big markets. There's high growth opportunities, and we had a lot of things to do in those segments. So I think it's important that we keep a bit focused and that we execute on those segments. When we talk about the operational criteria, we ask everyday questions like is this asset strategic or is this asset operational?
Is this asset a horizontal or a vertical integration? Is this asset expanding our presence geographically? Is it a scale play? And also very important, as Melissa talked before, people. Do we want the management to stay with us?
And does the asset bring the talent that we want for WEX? So all of those things are critical in the process of taking assets into consideration. Obviously, as well, we have financial targets. We won revenue growth rates that are higher than our organic growth rates. So obviously, that's very important for us.
We want assets where we can extract synergies both from a revenue point of view and from a cost point of view. And obviously, at the same time, we want to be we need to measure our EBITDA multiple, we need to be within industry standards. And we need to look at our accretion and dilution equation. It's a short term accretive. It's a medium term accretive.
So all these things we take into consideration. I will summarize M and A as a key leg of our growth pillars. But obviously, it's not any asset. The assets need to meet our criteria for WEX, and we will execute on those criterias before doing any transaction. And I want to finish with my takeaway after almost 2 hours of presentation.
My takeaway is the following one. We have been executing very solidly in the past 5 years. And you have our commitment that we expect to continue growing 10% to 15% in revenue and 15% to 20% on ANI. We are going to do that by deploying capital to accelerate growth and to reduce exposure to macroeconomic factors. And at the same time, we want to maintain a healthy balance sheet and do integration successfully as we have done in the past years.
EFS was a perfect example. I mean, Scott and the team did a great job, but I think it was the largest transaction of WEX. But at the end of the day, it has been the most successful integration that the company has done. And with that, I believe we are going to take couple of minutes break, and we will come back for a Q and A.
We're going to get started here in just a minute. If I can get the executive team back up on stage and folks to take their seats. Okay. We're going to get started here with Q and A. So, as you guys all know, we're webcasting this today.
So we're going to walk around with microphones. And if you could wait just a moment for the microphone for Mickey and I to get there, we'll do this for as long as you guys have questions or call it about an hour, and then we'll move on from there. So, David, here we go.
Thank you. David Togut, Evercore ISI. I have two questions. First, Jay, appreciate your presentation. That was really excellent.
Can you help us understand specifically how your solution in travel is differentiated versus some of the competitors? So I'm thinking specifically of, let's say, ENET and what some of the GDSs are trying to do like Sabre with Confirma and then Amadeus with the U. S. Bank partnership.
So I think there are a couple of differentiators. One is the technology itself. I mentioned this before in the presentation is everything that you can do in the UI, you can do through the API. So it's 100% enabled by the technology. I think 2 would be the access to currencies in our ability to walk around the world and be able to place a payment absolutely anywhere.
I think a third would be our access to funding and that could be funding through our bank, funding through a participation agreement, funding through our corporate revolver. Those are some of the ways.
Thank you. Just a question for Roberto, if I might. Appreciate the detailed long term guidance, especially the growth expectations by segment. Recognize that you're not including an impact in there from fuel prices. But if you could help us think about any modeling scenarios you might have worked through on fuel, obviously oil is down a lot in the last month or so.
You didn't talk specifically about 2019, but can you help us think about what impact we might see on 2019? And then how are you thinking about fuel within the context of the longer term model?
Well, obviously, I will start now with the long term target of 10% to 15% in revenue and 15% to 20% on ANI. So as we look into next year 2019, the expectation should be that we are going to be within those ranges, obviously. You talk about fuel prices. It will be good to if somebody in the room knows where fuel prices are going to be heading because the last 6 months have been an absolutely roller coaster. And they have been we do projections based on the NYMEX future curve.
But at the end of the day, we have seen the future curve going down, but the price at the palm not going down. And this has been the case in the last 4 or 5 months. So as we look into the future, this is why one of the important things is providing more transparency on how the business is doing ex PPG and ex FX because at the end of the day, in the long run, everything will be smoother.
And the thing I'd add to that is if you look at the diversification path, Ron, this idea of fuel prices, you know, talk about it being 20% of our revenue exposure. Our earnings have grown significantly, but our EPS exposure for every $0.10 hasn't really changed much. And so the impact to earnings is becoming diluted over time. And so if you kind of look at the path we're on, we're naturally moving away from that exposure having, you know, an impact on the company. So you know, as Roberta said in the interim, we're trying to make sure we're transparent.
We're disclosing as much as the SEC will allow us to disclose around the impact like for like in our business. But we're also, over a long period of time, looking at how we make that less of the story.
I mean to elaborate on Marisa's comment. On the ANI side, the impact of fuel prices from 3 years ago to today are almost half than what they were on a percentage basis, because obviously, we were at $4,000,000 $5 aniPS and we are now over 8. So obviously, that reduction is very important on the overall business.
My question was on the technology front. So you thanks for providing all those details. The question was the thing that is the efforts that you've done on in sourcing, platform consolidation, as well as moving to cloud. Obviously, that's driving a lot of the growth in the business market share gain. But how should we also think about the margin expansion potential from those efforts?
Does that lower your cost of processing and does that provide you opportunity for margin expansion both in near as well as longer term?
Okay.
That was an easy one.
Yes. I'll start and I'm sure you're going to elaborate on this. But the primary driver for us, there's 2. So the first is we believe that being more nimble is really important in the future. And that's part of how we've been able to win and compete in the marketplace.
So as we get bigger, moving into the cloud, some of the things that David has talked about is going to give us a lot more flexibility in terms of increasing speed as opposed to actually decreasing only starting to imagine. When you take a bunch of data scientists, which we only starting to imagine. When you take a bunch of data scientists, which we have, and you put that on top of a massive block of data, they come up with things that, you know, we in our company, you know, 5 years ago, we wouldn't have even perceived to be possible. So it starts from that. It starts more from the version of, how do we win?
How do we make sure we continue to be relevant and sticky in the marketplace? The idea of cost savings has been, frankly, an added benefit to that. And I don't know if you want to elaborate into the margin expansion.
I mean, what I would add is we have on our long term targets, we are implying margin expansion. So this means that the work everybody is doing, because it's not only on the technology side. When the groups are looking for investments, they are very thoughtful on how they want to do the investment. They also manage what is the priority list for each of the investments they want to do and how we can accelerate growth. So it's a combination of multiple efforts from all the teams.
Okay. And maybe just a second question on the organic growth for the fuel cards. The 4% to 8% organic growth, is there some conservatism built into it? And then particularly given the Shell and Chevron win, how should we think about in the near term? Is there an opportunity to go above that long term ranges at least in the near term?
I will start with that.
Scott is dying over there.
He was asking me the question before, that's why. So I mean, you heard from Scott and from Alice, I mean, the fleet global market is growing at 3%. So let's just start there. So this means that 4% to 8% organic means that we are going to continue gaining market share in the place. And obviously, we are the number one.
We are the market leader. Now when we talk about 4% to 8%, this is thinking in the long run. Obviously, we have visibility into 2019 2020 and obviously those numbers are going to be on the high end, if not maybe higher. But because we have the visibility on the 2 big portfolios that we are bringing into the company. Now when we give those 4% to 8% ranges, it's not 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, it's a long run.
So we feel very comfortable of the growth is 3%, we will continue to gain market share and this is reflected in the organic growth targets.
Part
Thank you. Bob Napoli from William Blair. And just Roberto, just to clarify before I ask the question on corporate payments is, the growth being in the range next year, 15% to 20%, is that using the current fuel curve? Because I mean, we have a dramatic move like that. Obviously, that does even though it's a lesser effect, it's still more material than traditional.
So is that being in the range, your confidence include the current fuel curve?
You're talking about corporate payments?
I'm talking about just the overall business and change in oil prices and the growth earnings growth initiatives? Yes.
As I said before, we're going to be within our long term growth targets. I mean, it's too early to tell. But obviously, those exclude fluctuations from FX and fuel prices. Fuel prices are going down. They have gone down 15%, twenty percent in the past month.
But in the palm, we have not seen yet a lot of the reduction. So when we get closer to next year, to 2019, when we do the earnings call in February, we will have more details for you. But at
this point
But that was assuming stable fuel prices.
Yes. The way I will think today and when we do as Scott was mentioning, when we do budgeting and how are we going to be allocating resources, what is how we think about growth, we obviously think excluding the noise.
Yes. Okay.
It's amazingly accurate. When we look at the NYMEX future curve at the point that we're locking into the year, and you go back and back, test that you know, that assumption that we make at the beginning of the year. It's actually fairly accurate when you get in you back test that initial point to how the year played out. And, you know, as Roberta said, there's a roller coaster in the middle. So you get huge fluctuations along the way.
But that kind of initial point at the beginning of the year tends to be pretty close to the number. And so when we give guidance out, in February, it actually will have a pretty good view of what we think the fuel price will be for the year.
Great. Thank you. And the other thing, Bob, I would say is we have been transparent disclosing what is the impact of the fuel prices of the $0.10 of PPG, plus to around $0.18 of ANI EPS on a full year basis. So that's also something that we are trying to manage openly. So everybody knows what the potential impact is for good and for bad.
Great. Thank you. Then, Jerry, on corporate payments. Obviously, a lot going on in that market sector and WEX investing aggressively. And maybe just how you look at the growth rate of the corporate payments business versus the payables business versus the travel business?
And how do you differentiate that, your payables business? And what I mean, there's a lot of ways to grow that. There's a lot of properties out there. There's accounts receivable. How do you differentiate yourself in that business?
And how do you think
about growth
long term? And how do you differentiate yourself?
Lots of questions in there, Bob. So let me answer the first part around the growth rates, which I think is a bit of restating, Bob, what we went through in the presentation. If I think of corporate payments, we're trying to grow that segment organically between 10% 15%. That's a combination of travel and then the U. S.
Payables business, which in layman's terms we call corporate payments. The spend growth that we see in both of those markets on the travel side, we're looking at spend growth around 9% as a global number. Now that's in different it's in pockets in different regions. The North America is more mature. Europe has a little bit higher spend growth and then Asia still tops spend growth.
If I go over to the corporate payments side of things, we're looking anywhere between 11% 20% growth spend growth there. And as you indicated in kind of getting into the differentiation, it's a very busy space right now. I think we have the great privilege of having a great technology set and a great product set in a marketplace that has yet to mature. And we're quite conscious about what our play is. If I think through what we're focused on right now, it is the main monetization, the most lucrative monetization avenue in corporate payments is through interchange.
And so we think about our strength in virtual card and how do we apply that to the space. At this point, we signed a definitive agreement to purchase a company called Noventis. We have not closed that. I can't talk a huge amount about that. But part of that thesis is how do you scale virtual card delivery to merchants.
And so that's kind of underlying that thesis. I think as we continue to grow in that segment, part of what my belief is, and I think we all share this, is it's a very exciting place to be right now. And you don't take advantage of that opportunity solely through a direct sales force. It's about how do I leverage the strength of FIs who oftentimes have an incumbent treasury relationship, but don't have the ability to similar to Just Business, don't have the ability to invest in a highly differentiated platform or how do I take advantage of very targeted money, whether that be in the fintech space or going after acute segments in the market because it's such a big market? And how do I empower partners to go off and attack those segments?
It's been a long winded answer, but hopefully it helps. I
had a build up to Bob's question. I'm Tien Tsin Huang from JPMorgan. So, Jade, the TAM you gave on corporate payments is big. I was surprised it's actually a little bit bigger. So are you just looking
at it?
You're surprised what? I was surprised it's not actually bigger. Is it really more of a virtual card opportunity that WEX is going out there?
The way we calculated that, Tam, is we do think it's conservative. The way we calculated it was off of interchange economics. There's a question that we continue to have and I think the market will have is, are there other monetization vehicles that aren't built on 3rd party card schemes? And I think that's we didn't include it in the TAM because we don't think that there's a model yet that will prove out there. But I could definitely foresee as we march forward over the next 5 years and hopefully the next time that I'm in front of this audience, we have something to talk about.
So that
said, that means virtual card is sort of the stepping stone for WEX,
but it
could expand into other areas.
At this
point, the data that we have in the United in the world, commercial payments, 2% of commercial payments, 2% is carded. And the U. S. Leads the way with 4%. So that's there's a lot of opportunity out there.
Understood. So my follow-up question is just actually on Europe on the fleet side. So I know you've won 9 of 10 in the U. S. I'm curious in Europe with the platform how it stood up today.
Are you in a position to grow that and replicate what you've done in the U. S? What needs to happen in order for that market to move?
So they are major oils. They tend to move a little bit slower than normal. What I would say is the decision making process is much, much longer. Today, we have the ExxonMobil carve out where we the WES business, where we have approximately 80,000 customers in that segment. We plan on diversifying some of the product mix inside that segment to provide more tools for the customers to be able to use.
And stay tuned in Europe. We're still engaged in other opportunities, but they tend to be moving slow.
Jim Schneider from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking the question and thanks for the presentations. I guess first of all, I want to ask on the fleet business. You've done obviously very, very well in the large fleets and some of the partnerships. But if you look at the SMB and small fleet space, can you maybe talk about at a high level at least some of your the elements of your strategy around expanding that business.
You talked about it growing significantly faster than the core. Maybe talk about how much you expect to be driven by kind of new direct sales? How much of that through partnerships? And any other levers you anticipate making on the pricing front, because I know you had some modernization over the past 18 months or so?
Sure. Specifically, when you think about the partner relationships that we have, we're laughing about it at the back of the room. Our sales forces compete against themselves. So our Now Shell sales force, our Now Chevron sales force competes against our ExxonMobil sales force, which is performing at a very high level. All of those segments, both at the mid major and at the major and even at the regional level, are all selling into that small marketplace.
So we've penetrated that marketplace with those partners. But over the last, say, year to 1.5 years, we have put some unique strategies out in place and have experienced some significant growth in the small marketplace or the SME marketplace and expect to continue to do so. Given the fact it's being webcast, I'm not going to get specific on strategies, but we really at the core of everything we do, we want to make it easier for the customer to do business with us. So we want to provide them with a very unique experience that anything that they want to do with us, they can do through a mobile app, they can do through a nice UI. And you got to think a lot of these customers in the small business marketplace just happen to have vehicles, right?
They're not transporting goods and services like a truckload carrier would be from point A to point B. So the experience there is much different than the experience that we create for those that are in the transport business. It literally is they have a fleet, they have needs. Today, we provide them with a fuel car with nice robust mobile apps. Now we need to make it easier for them because they don't necessarily want to have vehicles.
I promise you, if Verizon can do away with all of their vehicles, they would. But we need to make it easy for them to buy goods and services, utilizing our application, things as simple as they do have a breakdown. Why not be able to issue directly out of our Apple onetime virtual use Mastercard for a specific dollar amount to satisfy that need. Those are things we don't do today that we're doing out in the small marketplace to make it more advantageous. So hope that helps.
Yes. Thank you.
If you look at people perceive us to be really dominant in the large fleet space, which we are. But on top of that, if you look at our average vehicle size, it's a 15 vehicle fleet. So we've got a really deep history in working with small fleets as
well. Yes. And I would say that from a brand perspective as well, to add on to that, the major oil brands have some specific marketing strategies in each of the different portfolios that are much different across the portfolios. So they also cater to the specific needs of the fleet.
That's helpful. And then maybe for Melissa or Roberto, can you maybe comment on M and A in a little bit more depth in terms of how you're thinking about the strategy? Clearly, you've gotten into some very new areas and that driven a lot of the growth. So can you talk about today whether you view the kind of corporate payments or health care space as a little bit more attractive and or would you consider expansion area other than one of the 3 core areas you talked about today?
So when you look at the market right now, I think you're all aware that the multiples are, let's say, rich. And so I'd say we're deploying capital and thinking about it in the same way that we would normally, but we're a little bit more active than normal. When we look at the criteria, Roberta walked through how we think about that. But it kind of you start with, we're looking for assets to increase the organic growth profile of the company. That naturally leaves you here, looking at both corporate payments and health as an area, for us to plan.
And for us, as we look at each of those areas, does it extend the product set, or does it extend scale into the marketplace,
or does
it extend geographic reach? And those are really technology capabilities are going to be additive to the mix. If you kind of look back at the profile of the businesses that we've bought over the last few years and say you've heard that technology theme here, but it is something we're typically looking at fundamentally. We also look for the relationship with customers, so because we find if there is a strong relationship with the customer, that that's something that we can take 1 +1 and equal 3 at the end of the day. So I'd say the same criteria that Roberto talked about that is up on that page is something that we think about every time we get into an acquisition opportunity, some of which we actively go out and pull into the pipeline, some of which is sent to us via just, you know, regular source of activity.
And it has been an incredibly active year, Nicola, for her corporate development group.
Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. I want to dig into the Chevron and Shell relationships and maybe ask Scott just to talk about the operational undertaking it is, going forward, how we should think about how it sequences into your volume and the actual revenues and earnings for the company?
To the extent I can, what I would say would be this is, anytime you undertake some of these major oil portfolios or any big win for that matter, there's some expense upfront, where you have hiring of sales teams, you have hiring operationally, you have hiring marketing, you have outside agencies where you're putting together joint marketing strategies, you have card production. All of those things take place before you start seeing the 1st customer. So Roberto has shared during some of the conference calls some of the expenses that we've incurred as a result of those portfolios. But we look at businesses and those relationships for the long term. So if all of us have to make up some short term pain in order to accommodate securing that win for the long term, then it's a little bit lumpy at first.
It levels out quickly, and then you experience substantial revenue growth. I would say that's not different for either one of those portfolios. It all depends upon how large the conversion is, where it's coming from, how nice the provider is, where it's coming from behaves. And then ultimately, we can end up with a nice smooth transition once all of that gets aligned.
You guys have anything else to add for Melissa?
I mean, we have talked a lot on Chevron and Shell. And this is spot on. I mean, you have to go through the process to onboard those portfolios. And we look for the long run. I mean, we have 10 years or 13 years contract with them.
And what we want is to when is the time where we're going to see the revenue every month. And that's what we are looking for, and this is where all the team is working towards.
Got it.
And we talked on the call about the first half of next year, you're still ramping, right? And so you've got all the costs that are there, and you're ramping revenue. And the second half of the year is when you actually start to see the benefit of that. And so the full economic benefit in terms of earnings, you start to see the year after that, like, really bleed through from an earnings perspective.
I guess, Jay, you mentioned the various networks that you've signed on recently, JCB, Visa. You guys announced something with American Express last week. Could you just talk about how all of that works? And I know you guys also renewed or extended with Mastercard. Maybe you could just talk about the benefits of that relationship as well.
Yes. So I showed the slide that showed 2016 to 2019 in this effort to bring everything in house and be able to scale. The one piece of it that I believe will never be able to scale is the value that 3rd party card scheme provides to us. And that value is quite simply, it passports us absolutely everywhere. We really enjoy a great relationship with Mastercard, and we've built the business with Mastercard's help.
We've reached a sufficiently large enough scale where we brought Visa into the picture last year, and we've gone through the tech implementation, and they're now fully enabled on the platform as well. And as we continue to grow, we're going to grow with both. JCB, the Japanese market, you have nearly ubiquitous access, card access to Japan through JCB. It's actually quite difficult from a coverage standpoint with the other two networks. And this is a narrative that plays out throughout different regions of the world, which is there are places in the world where a Visa or a Mastercard isn't it doesn't have the acceptance that we need for our customers.
And there are 2 options One is we figure out who is the local card network that we can work with, a la JCB. Another option would be, how do we work with the card networks to increase acceptance through merchant acquirers, which is also a strategy that we've taken with Mastercard in the past. The American Express and let me just clarify with American Express. We're not issuing American Express cards. I want to be fully clear on that and if there's any
misunderstanding on that. We do not issue
American Express cards. That's not part
of our road map. Commerce, P&C, key regions. And Commerce, P&C, key regions. Each of those institutions has its own focus in this very large AP market. They have different marketing strategies.
And what we provide is the technology service provision to all of them. And they provide they essentially wrap that software to look like theirs. And that's what American Express has done. And they're now going off and selling that to their corporate clients. It does they issue their own AmEx cards on our technology.
Do you get any volume from them as they convert? Or is it just on a
So the economics of the FI portfolio, the financial institutions portfolio, so this is the white labeling of the software. It still is interchange economics. But instead of providing the technology, the issuing and the funding, we're just providing the technology. And so there's just a smaller percentage of the volume that we take.
Could I ask just one more, Steve? Sorry. Just following up on M and A. It's an important part of your term targets. And I don't know how significant Aventus is, but like as we think through the next couple of years, like are there any significant M and A targets that you're considering that would be, additive to those M and A part of the targets that you have?
You know, it's interesting as we look at the markets that they actually really are all sizes. We have a preference to do mid- to bigger acquisitions just because of the amount of work that goes with a smaller transaction. So over the last few years, that's really been our focus. We haven't done many tuck ins. And so maybe it's kind of if it's going to chew up a huge amount capital, it has to be worth it.
You know, it says you know, part of it just to kind of give you a little background of our thinking, we very aggressively pursued EFS. And we did that because every time we did a model, what we realized was the scalability that we could get from adding EFS into our core business then allowed us to accelerate the diversification that we wanted to do. And EFS, because it had a different business model, actually reduced our overall exposure to fuel prices. So it was a it was a very intentional play on our behalf, where we convinced Warburg to sell it earlier than what they would have wanted to.
Don't underestimate a good management team there.
And the thing this is what I was going to say is that what we didn't fully appreciate was how we could bring it in and actually increase our revenue growth profile. That was something that was better than what we expected. You know, Scott's relationships he has in the industry, combined with the relationships we had, you know, really thinking about the product in a totally different way has created opportunities for us. And so that may have been counterintuitive play for us, but it was a very intentional play on our behalf. And as we think about how to deploy capital, that's how we think about it.
We do it through a huge amount of scenarios and look at what if we deploy it this way, what do we look like? If we deploy it this way, what do we look like? Most of them are, you know, great. And then it just becomes a question, what can you actually execute against because you take this theoretical, and you have to then be able to go and get the asset and get it at a price that makes sense. And so that's why you create some level of flexibility into those scenarios.
So it could be something that's large, but it would have to be something that's worth, you know, shutting aside the market for a while if we were to do that or deploying equity, if that makes sense. And so for us, we tend to look at more of midsize transactions just because it enables us to have future optionality.
Hi, good morning. This is James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. I wanted to follow-up on, I guess, Sanjay and Jim's questions around M and A. Starting with you, Roberto, can you talk about how much of your targets are you build in deployment of capital whether via M and A or buybacks particularly on the revenue and earnings? Are you already building in some contribution from acquisitions, on the top line?
And how much, if any, contribution are you building into your long term targets from buybacks?
Well, let me start with the revenue side. I mean, we gave you the long term targets, and also we about the organic growth. So Melissa mentioned organic growth of 8% to 12%. So when you look at our range of 10% to 15 percent, you can get quickly to what is our long term expected revenue increase from M and A. So that's easy.
On the other side, I mean Melissa has talked a lot about M and A and following up on the questions. Our job now from the finance side is how we can be more flexible, have a better credit agreement, better covenants, and we have been very active in the marketplace with Steve and the treasury team to have more flexibility and more access to cash. And when the transaction comes, we will evaluate, is it better to pay with corporate cash? Is it better to raise some debt? Is it better not to do some shares capital increase?
And as we look into the future, the share buybacks is also I mean, it was on my list on the strong balance sheet, maintain a strong balance sheet. At the end of the day, it's part of the equation. But when we think about shares buyback, it's something that when you look financially, what is the best short term versus the long term, and we evaluate all these equations. Okay.
And then for you, Jay, maybe can you elaborate a little bit on the Noventis acquisition? What that delivers to you? Where you're looking in terms of technology or capability or reach? And what was attractive about that? And I guess just generally, I mean to Melissa's point on valuations in the market, was this like a market type valuation that you're going be paying assuming that the deal closes?
Thanks.
Yes. So there's only so much that I can talk about because we've we're in this period where we have not purchased the asset. But I will put an underline under 2 things. 1 would be the technology that they have is excellent, and I consider it best in the industry for delivering virtual card virtual cards to merchants. And they do it in a highly automated way.
85% -ish of their virtual card payments are delivered automatically. I get really excited about this as you think through our portfolio, both our direct portfolio and our partner portfolio, is it provides a way to get the main monetization vehicle that we're talking about in this industry moving in a scalable way. That's one piece of it. The other piece of it is the primary piece of their portfolio and when they look at their service provision with their customers is in the bill pay space. And that space is one that we've watched closely over the past 5 years.
It's a space that we believe is not mature yet, and it's a chance for us to help that piece of the ecosystem mature.
Is there
anything else you'd add?
Do people understand what Noventis does? Like, generally, can I give an example of what they do?
Yes. So in the virtual card space, as it's grown up, we, WEX, deliver virtual cards through 3 mechanisms. It would be we deliver a virtual card via e mail. You'd be surprised how many virtual cards are delivered still delivered by fax or we deliver the virtual card through an API to a partner that then delivers that virtual card through whatever means that they see fit. Noventis has built a way to deliver payments through to merchants through using robots in some cases, using their own API protocols.
They can configure robots to get into to deliver to paste essentially the virtual card number into a web form or to navigate in IVR. It's just it's some great technology.
Hi, Oscar Turner from SunTrust. First question is on the fleet business. You talked about growing customer wallet share partially through nonfuel spin categories. And just wondering what are your capabilities outside of fuel spin today? And how should we think about the long term opportunity there?
So today, we focused I don't think my mic there it is. Today, we focused on the 3 areas we talked about, providing fuel discounts to our customers. We have approximately 3,800 locations where our customers are now receiving fuel discounts. Our customers have the ability to purchase tires through our application at a significant discount irrespective of brand. We have cell phone applications that our customers can utilize.
We've had proven success in one of our markets and now we're rolling it out globally across our entire spectrum. So that's how I would think about that. And in a nutshell, just think about it really simplistically. If you look at the overall strategy, we've got approximately 500,000 B2B clients that are fleets. If you go back to the example that I provided previously, they're not in the fleet moving business.
They just happen to have vehicles. So our job is to provide them with goods and services where they for their fleet needs, where we can enable them to pay using our application and then receive a small marketing fee for enabling the suppliers to be able to pay through our application. So it's almost creating that marketplace for our customers.
Okay. Thanks. And then secondly was on corporate payments. Jay talked about supplier enablement being a key to growth in that market. Do you see as the biggest barriers for growth in virtual card acceptance?
And then do you think lower interchange meaningfully grows virtual card share? Are there other barriers?
Yes, it's a great question, and I wish we all knew the answer. I think we will test and learn along the way. We're open to different models. And I think the virtual card, as we have grown and helped build that industry over time, has worked very well, and we all know that. It's worked very well in niche applications, but has had less of a penetration in other applications.
And so we continue to work through that.
Thanks. Marshall Jaffe, Neuberger Berman. WEX was really present at the creation, really responsible for the creation of the modern OTA payments system that in which it's now a dominant player, you can make the case that you're similarly situated in business the corporate payments sector, do you see it evolving in anything like the same way that OTA payments have where it becomes perhaps something of an oligopoly? Or do you think it's too complex and too fragmented to ever evolve that way?
It's a similar answer to what I just had here, I think, which is the OTA space was a very niche application where there was codevelopment of a payment mechanism that worked for the OTA to send the funds and for what started as a hotel but are now other types of suppliers to receive those payments in a way that removed the human elements and propensity for human error and frankly malice from the system. That's been in place for quite a long time at this point. And as I look over at the payable space, it is a very large diverse market. The beauty of the virtual application
to OTA was built on the
to get paid in a way that works for everybody. I think the key for us is actually part of the strategy around working with partners and FIs is, how do you create the right payment rail at the right price with the right level of data, all of that, for unique applications in the payment space.
Thanks. In the long term guidance for fleet organic growth of 4% to 8 percent, can you break it down a little bit more in terms of what you're expecting from OTR and kind of the smaller business segments there?
Let's just start now. It's probably the first time we give you guidance broken down by each of the segments. I mean, we look at first at the 3% market growth worldwide. And then when we get specifically into our businesses, the first thing we do is we look at the different segments that we have. And as we look at the past 3, 4 years and bringing EFS into the equation, I mean, we have been seeing growth coming very steadily in all of the different segments where we operate.
And if you ask me, do you think OTR is going to grow more than small fleets or larger fleet, I would say to you that we expect to continue growing similarly where we have been growing and that we don't have any specific target where we can say we're going to be growing 10% an area versus another. What is true is that on the and Scott was mentioning that on the small fleet segment, obviously, there is where the more market share is available to us. And it's a smaller piece of the pie for us. So indirectly, you could see that coming into equation.
I would also add to that that we're winning in each of our respective markets. And I think we demonstrated that in the presentation. So for the over the road guys that are listening, the expectations
are still going to be as large
as they were and are. And we expect similar growth across all the different segments. To be candid, we spent a lot of time in the 3rd Q4 implementing some significant accounts that you're seeing in the 3rd Q4.
Thanks. And then just a quick question on the corporate pay side. For the FI partners that you have, are they also offering other competitive or competitor products? And if so, why do they pick to lead with yours versus other options?
Yep. It depends. Most of the portfolio uses our software stack exclusively for their portfolio. There are a couple that have our software stack at a competing card management system, whether that be taking advantage of the API, needs to have all of the bells and whistle of kind of the most broad software. And the alternative, they might have a slimmed down version that's in house or they procure on the market at a lower price.
Thanks. It's Tim Willi with Wells Fargo. I had a couple of questions. The first is, and then maybe this is a bit abstract, but Melissa are division heads. Could you talk about over the last 2, 3, 4 years, whatever it is, about how the product development process and go to market has changed?
Is there anything that's going on within the company as you've evolved and sort of gotten more scale about how you interact with customers? Are you dealing with different people at your customer base about product creation and getting to market?
It has changed over the last few years. And it's changed in a few different ways. We have very intentionally built up the talent and expertise we had in both our product and technology areas. We did that because we wanted to make sure that we were bringing unique functionality into the marketplace at a more rapid pace. And you can see that play out.
You know, some of the things that we've demoed today are new. And then the idea of ClearView was something that came about because we segregated a group of people that were not involved in the day to day business. And so that's the other thing that I would say that's become different is we've got, deeper product and technology talent than we've ever had. And those are embedded in the lines of business. We also have a group of people that just work on early stage product and can tinker, frankly, a lot more.
And so they can sit in the background, and, we can expose them to customers where appropriate or not if they want to be more in an incubator mode. In most cases, we tend to start with an idea, develop that, and then rapidly work, prototypes with our customer base. And then they become advocates of the product. And I'd say there's a number of things that have changed in the background. And then you insert, David into the mix.
And what he's been doing in the background is just make that easier know, because a lot of that we were powering through of being able to, affect change. But when you introduce what he's doing in the background, he's enabling us to move faster in a much more disciplined way, which is counterintuitive to someone whose whole background is around innovation but is creating discipline in a very specific way so that not everything goes through the same funnel, but there's enough sharing in architecture forethought that you can share the things that are most important. And that's becoming increasingly transformative to how we think about our opportunities as a company. So I'd say there's a lot on that front. David, would you say anything more?
Yes. So when you hear agile, a lot of people think that it's you're just moving very quickly, and there's not a lot of discipline behind it. The agile process themselves are incredibly disciplined. There's a lot of methodology behind them, a lot of meetings, a lot of organizational pieces. It's just it's geared towards moving fast, being nimble.
But it also has a lot of metrics and lots of ways to track what's happening. And those metrics allow you to tune and get faster and more efficient. So that's one of the things we're seeing through the organizations. As the team has become more used to working in an agile methodology, we can actually we can optimize and we see all these groups self evolving and becoming more and more efficient as well from a pure product development standpoint.
So Tim, if you look at the releases that we mentioned in the last earlier on stage, the retail fleet business we used to release once a year. Now we're releasing 6 times a year. And the OTR business, we're releasing every 6 to 8 weeks. We actually release weekly in addition to that, but just major moves. With every one of those releases, they're enhancements for our customers, right?
So that's what's changed and that's what's making us more efficient. And that's what's providing us with differentiation against others in the marketplace.
And you can see that when you go to do a customer presentation, and you can start to talk about everything that we can do, the capabilities that you have. It is you know, it's you can just see the look on someone's face, you know, come across and say, you take something that sounds easy, and you start to delve into the level of complexity by which we can we can deal with and the tools that we have to deploy in totality, it is making a difference in our ability to bring in and win business. And I think, you know, look what we're doing on TAG. We're just starting. It's the capability that we've developed, which we haven't talked about, frankly, until today because we wanted to make sure that it remained a competitive advantage for us.
But that's something that now we can deploy. And as Jay was talking about, the fact that these FIs and partners have come to us for that user interface, that customer interface. Now we can combine that with the capability of doing processing.
What people out there give us credit for. If you look, we all talked about a common API layer that we have to our customers. We all have mobile applications that we talk to our customers about. We all have UIs, and they all have a similar look and feel. They may be performing and servicing different areas inside of payments.
But the most important guy on the stage is the guy to my left that we all try to grab resources from, right? So
Some more than others, probably.
Hopefully, more now. Ultimately, those mobile applications, we learn as we migrate them across the businesses. Those UIs, we learn as we migrate them across the businesses. So there's a lot more commonality out in the marketplace technology wise than what I believe everyone out there gives us credit for.
That's great. One follow-up, just on health care. So I think a handful of years ago, there was, I guess, a bit of a flirtation with payer provider in the Payspan partnership. And I guess just as you built out institutional knowledge, scale around the consumer side, do you revisit that? Have you just I know it's a very complex code to crack, but I'm just sort of curious thoughts around that aspect of health care and payments and moving money and information.
Yes. I think it's still out there. There's nothing that wouldn't say there's a lot of money being moved and it's going to continue to be moved. When you look at where we ended the last time 4 or 5 years ago, there wasn't a pull through when you looked at the level of motivation it would take to get all the people to line up and say, this is the way we're going to use it. And especially when you look at the monetary way that everybody had to make a piece of money in the partnership flow.
And so I don't think that's changed today. I don't know necessarily that, that won't change over the next 2 or 3 years. The amount of health care spend is significant that way. I think it could come about actually in more niche ways. If you think back to the P and C example, what they've got right now, they are going out, and they're actually looking at individual providers and to do the pace flow for that.
And so I think rather than thinking you might get the whole chain immediately, it might actually come in more individual pieces right away where you actually go in with somebody and say, Here's the cost savings we're going to have for you. Here's what it's going to cost you to do it, and you roll it out. And still the same piece of that value chain, but it kind of comes at it from a slightly different aspect.
Glenn Greene from Oppenheimer. Another question for Jay, and some of this has been touched on, but you sort of mentioned that 2% of commercial payments were card based. And I'm just sort of curious how you think about this, but how do you bend that curve? My guess is the barriers today are similar to what they were 10, 15 years ago. And is interchange still a big barrier for that?
And that's obviously a big premise to your business model.
Yes. Two thoughts on bedding that curve. One is I mentioned a company called Divvy up here, and there are others in the Fintech 250 that have taken this consumerization of digital payments that now 30 40 year olds and 50 year olds who are leading B2B companies have cut them used to. And they're saying, how do I apply that to business? So I think that's a piece of bending the curve is the consumer front has been digital for so long.
There comes a point where leadership of B2B companies say, well, why haven't we done that here? So there's more appetite. Another thought, maybe I have 3. Maybe I have 4 by the time I'm done. Another thought would be checks are just expensive.
And I think they've always been expensive, but I think we're the CFO role at institutions now understands is increasingly aware of how expensive checks are. There is a direct cost to cutting the checks, but then the human effort to do cash application of those checks can be pretty significant. I think the and so you look at it, the digitization of the payment flow is a way to remove the human element, which is prone to errors and quite costly. I think the 3rd piece is, I think it is related to interchange, right, is the interchange model and the 4 party model. If we go back to the history of Visa and Mastercard, they were all set up to connect buyers with issuers, connected to a scheme that they had merchant acquirers and then had a merchant.
The 4 party money model was built for consumers. They to Visa and Mastercard's credit, I think they've done a great job of modernizing their infrastructure and the different payment modalities to pay. It doesn't necessarily have to be a virtual card. We can do straight through payments. We have all different types of interchanges available to us.
I think the any talk about price is really a talk about value. And so it's about getting the value equation right, which is when do you deliver the payment, with what data is it delivered and how do you streamline the whole process. And then there's a value that is paid for
that. Okay.
And then Melissa or Roberto, so at the beginning, most of you mentioned that fuel sensitivity is about 20% of the business. As you look at over the 5 year period, the M and A sounds like it's going to be skewed toward corporate pay. And healthcare, the growth algorithms for each of those two segments are faster than fuel. Is it reasonable to think that fuel sensitivity 5 years out is, let's say, 10% of the business?
I would answer that because
they have more will be the model and our long term projections. The answer is not going to be 10% because the fleet segment is still large and we have great wins in the pipeline. But as we progress into the years, that number will continue to go down. And is it in 5 years or in 10 where we're going to be at the 10% that you mentioned? It's to be seen.
But as we discussed on the M and A piece and as Melissa has been talking, for us, it's very important that where we deploy the capital, especially on the money side, is more towards the areas of growth.
We don't have a specific target that we're trying to get to is another way of saying that, but we are trying to just reduce it. Like and that happens naturally and it will also happen by intent as we do acquisitions.
Okay.
Yes, a question for Jeff. What kind of Shared Life growth is assumed in that 15% to 20% organic revenue growth target? And related to that, if it's similar 15%, 20% growth in insured lives, I mean, are you able to grow ARPU?
Yes. When you look at the assumptions on basic insurance coverage, we're not changing much. So you look at you got about 150 Americans who have are going to get coverage through normal insurance products, and that's going to continue to happen. We pick up different in different categories. And so if you look at the account coverage we get in a standard insurance plan, kind of yesterday's plan, we probably get 20% or 25%.
When you look at the coverage we can get in a high deductible plan with the health savings count, there are places where you get 70% or 80% of an insurance coverage. And so that shift is happening. So most of the growth is happening within the core insurance rates. And there are good trend lines. So if you go from companies covering at 20%, the companies covering at 70% to 80%, The one other thing that's happening there is most companies are stopping in the middle.
It used to be people thought everybody is going to end up on a high deductible plan, and it will shift all the way over. What we saw is, there was a lot of momentum early for people not to move, and everybody thought it was going to go all the way. What's actually settling right now is most of the especially the larger organizations have multiple insurance products, and they let you choose, and they give you different cost sharings. All of those things kind of end up in different spots. But what they do when you look at our account models, our account models then are really the things that say, we get a SaaS account as we get more accounts.
We get an interchange play as we go across there. And so those things are based on it. And so you look at a flexible spending account, it's going to grow kind of single digits, a health savings account is maybe more like 'eighteen. And they fit well within what's going to happen with the insurance products. And so the 2 check and balance well and I think are fairly conservative as you look at going out.
Tom, Zuho. I had a question on the repositioning, Melissa, into kind of leaning in deeper into technology. And it sounds like that was a pretty successful and deliberate effort by the company to differentiate themselves across all the segments. I just want to make sure that, that kind of effort is done now. You kind of had a kind of a steady state of just kind of magic one of where to what project to
Okay. Cut out at the end. Magic pipeline. I heard magic pipeline.
So just kind of where we're at in that process of the repositioning seems like it was a multiyear effort in terms of getting the talent and doing whatever you had to do internally to kind of really lean in on technology and products. I just want to make sure that that's the correct characterization that we're kind of at the end of that. Now it's just kind of managing kind of the pipeline of projects to kind of work on.
I think of that as actually as you know, because it's a lifelong learning concept for us. It's going to be, it's going to be a multiyear continued adventure that we're on. Technology has always been our strength. And if you look at how we've sold and positioned in the marketplace, it has been our strength. I just fundamentally believe that the market's changing dramatically.
And so the strength that we have now is something that we need to continue to really think about building on exponentially because of just the way the world is changing. And so we very intentionally took something and said, how do we build upon that, the product, the technology additions that we had and then ultimately adding in David looking at transactions with that lens. All of that has been very intentional. But I would say we're not through yet. When David ended saying, we welcome you back in a year, every year, it is pretty amazing what we accomplish and how much we transform the company.
When I first started at WEX, we were $50,000,000 in revenue, right? So kind of put that in perspective. Trailing telephone is $1,400,000,000 We have a huge capacity to change. And that change for us, in the background is making the company faster, making us more nimble, using technology tools that we can present externally, which is great because that means we're winning more business. Equally exciting to me is that we're presenting them internally because we can create a better customer experience at a lower cost.
And so it's my long winded way of saying we're not done yet. There's a lot of work we feel like we have to do. There's a lot of opportunities we're seeing because of work we've already done. And we believe that's part of why we're winning business along the way.
Just a follow-up to that, Melissa. So it sounds like it's helping you win business and maybe there's some internal efficiency improvements that you're benefiting from. How you're thinking about pricing for value, right? So as you're adding all this new functionality, where are you at in that process?
Yes. That's really an interesting question. It's something that we talk about frequently because we believe that our offerings are differentiated and that we're generally And so we do think about value. At the same time, we have scalability, that we're at a size and scale that allows us a competitive advantage as well. And so those things, we think about it as something you have to balance.
We want to make sure that we're maximizing what we can get from a pricing perspective and relevance to the benefit that we're offering. But also, at the same time, as we continue to scale and grow, we can outpace, on that value equation, too. And it is a constant dialogue that we have of making sure that we get that right point. We did some pricing modernizations in places we actually thought we were too low. There are places we might say, you know what, if we get a little bit more aggressive here, we think we can increase the growth profile of the company, and we think that's worth a trade.
And that's a pretty dynamic discussion and not easy ones because every time you make a change like that, there's a ripple effect to it. And so we're pretty thoughtful about it.
And just to add on
that, I think in each of our respective markets, specifically in fleet, in no case in any of those recent wins were we the low cost provider. So we are getting a premium for all the aforementioned reasons that we talked about earlier.
I think Jay shared with his business, you get kind of a 9% tailwind to grow just from the spend that's going on. I think of that as like a same store sales basis. What is that in the health care side? Can you unpack a little bit of the growth dynamics that go on in that 15% to 20
Sure. If you think about the core market growth, we're in markets that grow anywhere between 15% or 5% 18%, and so it's pretty broad. So you think about the growth, we usually think of that as kind of a low teen number. And so our goal has been to grow in the high teens. And if you look at the map, we've been in a spot where we've typically been 18% to 20% growth.
The market has kind of been growing 11% to 12%. And I think those things will change some over time. But generally, that's a similar map. So you probably have the 9% is probably similar to 11% or 12%. And what we've tried to do is kind of beat that by a pretty reasonable margin.
Great. One follow-up. The kind of a high level question, but you've got the business has a lot of distribution through 3rd parties. And how do you think long term about kind of preserving your economic interest in it? Or what are some
of
the protectors for the company and shareholders?
So we believe in multichannel distribution models. We have shown an ability to do that. And Scott talked about competing against himself. We believe that the customer will pick. And so if we in a very large market so I'd say we start there with very large markets if we allow multiple opportunities at the end of the day, that partner will or customer will pick an option.
And we're making money on any of them. And so we're you know, we're pretty comfortable with that concept. And how you architect that and then structure it in a way that, that means that it's you know, it's it may not be the same revenue, but if it's the same earnings contribution, then that's really the more important thing to us, is are we driving volume growth? Are we restructuring the way so that it's profitable regardless of which outlet it comes through? And then another key thing is we've done that in the past is making sure that you build trust with the people you're doing business with because, you know, and again, in Scott's example, if they think that we're poaching our ExxonMobil portfolio to move it over to a WEX Universal card, that doesn't work, right?
And that's why we've got these long term relationships. Same thing true you know, if you think about any part of our business, we're working with partners. And so we're very conscious of how we go into the marketplace, the rules that we abide by. And so at the end of the day, we feel like this multichannel approach, where we're deploying it, is actually better for the investors and will increase the growth profile of the company in a profitable way.
And I think a lot of it's the coverage there. I look at our space and I think about what a bank does is so different than what the health plan does. And then you also have financial institutions trying to tie a health savings account to a 401. We get a lot of coverage in scale by having distribution partners. And that doesn't mean you don't have different models where you might go in and do something very specific for the Mayo Clinic, which is, hey, the Mayo Clinic wants to come and do things directly with you and have an understanding and a direction.
But then you've got other places where you say, jeez, our scale across geography, across different account types has expanded significantly. And then again, when you think small to large, we have a lot of partners who sell the enterprise space, but then you go with somebody who's great in the small business space, that gets us a lot of feet in the small business space that, quite frankly, we couldn't afford to scale and fund. And so I think there's a lot of it, which is you have a good scalable model, you have a lot of trust developed across the partnership, but you also make sure there's enough different vertical and geographic coverage that people can be successful and win. And it gives us a lot of scale in our P and L for distribution coverage.
All right. I'm going to close, then, on the last page in your book if you're interested. You know, what I was thinking about today, you know, Roberto said in his presentation, we are very thoughtful of how we set the company up to meet our long term objectives. It is something that we talk about every time we go through strategic planning, and, it's been a high focus. I have had a great pleasure to work with this team, including the people that aren't presenting today, to grow the business.
And, you know, if you look at the foundation of how we're growing, we've got the great advantage of the fact that we're in these massive markets that are growing. So, yes, that's nice for us. At the same time, we've been really thoughtful around how we can continue that growth profile using the assets that we have. And the 2 primary themes that you would have heard across this today is the culture of the company, which we believe is a differentiator. We believe that's part of how we attract the talent and build upon the success that we've had.
We also believe that the technology is fundamentally a differentiator, and it's a place that has been a strength that we are going to make even stronger over time. And those things are what give us confidence that we can continue to hit the long term growth profile of the company that we've given you. We've given a little bit more detail around that. What we wanted to make sure of as you walked away today with 2 things, a great deal of clarity around how we intend to execute and grow the company. So you went one layer below what we normally do.
And secondly, a lot more insight into what we do because sometimes it feels like that gets lost, the complexity of the solutions that we have, the level of integration that we have. And so the demos that we went through today were to give you much more visibility into examples of what we can do, but think of them as illustrative. These are things that we've done over the last few years, and we've only just begun. We have an intention to continue to deliver innovation into the space. Is part of why we've got people approaching us now to do more, than we've ever had in that front.
So I want to thank you for your time. And is that it? That's it. All right. Thank you.
Have a nice day.