All right. Thanks everyone for joining us today, both in person and online. My name is Cris Kennedy. I'm the research analyst here at William Blair, that covers the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest, please visit the website at williamblair.com. Next up is WEX. From the company, we have the CEO, Melissa Smith, and Steve Elder from IR is in the audience today. WEX does a lot of things, but at the core, they provide tools that help simplify the business of running a business. WEX has been coming to this conference for well over a decade, so we appreciate their continued attendance, and with that, let me pass it over to Melissa.
Thank you. You actually stole some of my thunder. So our purpose, and this is our purpose both internally and externally, is to simplify the business of running business. We think about this at the core of everything we do. We wanna make sure that we're removing the toil that people have of running their companies, whether they're small or large, and meeting them where they're at in their stage of growth. So the way that we do that, we're really looking at how we can strip out complexity. And if you think about the markets we're in, we're intentionally in markets that are quite complicated. We're looking at places that we can remove complexity, and there's three different ways that we're focused on that.
The first is that we have a global commerce platform, so we think a lot about the underlying technology and making sure that we're presenting the technology in a way that's easy for our customers to consume. It's important that it operates at scale, 'cause in each of the markets that we're in, we're market leading, and so it needs to be able to both scale and be reliable. And then on top of that, we wanna make sure that the solutions that we're offering are personalized, that our customers are able to engage with us in an easy way so that they're seamlessly embedded. And again, like, those ways are gonna be very different if you're a very small company or if you're a really large company. So you may wanna connect through us through an API.
You may actually want us to hardwire into your code base, depending on what you have for underlying technology capability. But we're developing products that work for our customers in any of those different environments. And then the last thing is this idea that insights power success. There is a thread across all of our products, and I'd say increasingly important to us is the underlying data and dataset that we have. The data enables us to create products that are unique in the marketplace because of the number of customers that we're doing business with across the platform, and that allows our customers to make more intelligent choices. And so it's been a big focus of ours over time, and I'd say even more so now in the environment where you can supercharge some of the tools that are accessing data.
The system that we have right now, when I talk about the commerce platform, we're exposing it in different ways to different customer segments. Across all of this, we go into the marketplace, both directly with our own sales force and through partners, so we distribute through partner channels. Those partners are different across to each of the different verticals that we're exposed to, but we believe fundamentally that having more avenues of distribution into the marketplace is a positive for us. On the left-hand side of this, we're gonna simplify employee benefits. This idea is that we're creating products that remove some of the complexity of being an employee.
So we're offering those both to partners who are in the marketplace, either because they're interested in a deposit that's associated with an account, or because they are a broker, or they're an insurance provider, or they're a payroll company. But there's many different ways that we go into this marketplace. At the end of the customer experience, we're trying to ensure that they are buying products that are allowed under tax law, and that that is fulfilled in a way that creates recordkeeping and payability for the partner or customer and is done in a very seamless way for the end employee.
On the streamlining and receiving payments, we're integrating into our customers to enable a payment in a very scalable way. So in that case, think of a could be an online travel agency that's receiving a payment from a consumer and making a payment to a hotel. We're doing that at scale across the business, and we're making sure that we're doing that in a way that, again, is removing rework. It's a highly automated process that we have across our portfolio that requires very little human interaction. And then on managing fleets and mobility, we're working with our customers there to eliminate misuse. So primarily, where people are worried about paying for things that are not a corporate asset, we're providing tools and expertise to make sure that doesn't happen, and that that vehicle is able to be utilized in a very efficient way.
So, and those customers cared about convenience and control, whether that's with an ICE vehicle or with an EV vehicle. And then across to all of that, we're looking again at how we can distribute into the marketplace that gives the most avenues that lead to WEX.
We talked about our growth profile. In 2023, we had 8% revenue growth, 9% adjusted net income growth. You know, we're, we're proud of the numbers in 2023, in part because it showed the resilience of the model. I'll talk about our long-term growth targets in a minute. What I've really appreciated over the last few years is the fact that we've been able to grow in many different environments. When you think about in 2023, we had a freight recession happening across our, our customer base.
We had fuel prices that were dropping, interest rates that were increasing, and at that same time, we were able to grow the business. Growing revenue 13% last year, when you strip out the impact of fuel prices and FX. Go into the first quarter, again, I would say some of those same continued trends. Fuel prices were down, interest rates are up, and we're still in a freight recession. And again, we continued to grow the business. Excluding the impact of fuel prices and FX, we grew revenues 10% in the quarter. So I actually like zooming back out and say, if you look over a period of time, you know, a long period of time in this case, our CAGR has, you know, been pretty remarkable.
So you've seen some volatility that goes intra-year based on fuel prices, but if you look at the beginning and end point, that's about the same fuel price in both cases, and so this is a true growth rate. So growing 14% in that period of time, Mobility growing 10%, Corporate Payments 12%, and then our Benefits business from the point we entered it, has grown 24%. So we feel, you know, really good about the growth that we have posted and continue to post across the business. And the way that we're thinking about the business is as making sure that we're gearing the business to continue to grow. That 10%-15% is our long-term growth target. The other thing that's interesting, if you look at this page, is the different segments of the business.
So our Mobility business is still the majority of the business, but over time, you see how the business has become quite diversified. So we've seen growth in our Benefits business as well as Corporate Payments. So those are leading into our long-term targets. So you can see where we've been. We've been very focused on continuing to deliver on our long-term growth targets. In the future, we want to continue to be focused on delivering on our long-term growth targets. So we've said we want to grow the business, and these targets are excluding the impact of fuel prices and FX. Want to grow the business 8%-12% organically, total growth of 10%-15%, so there's an implied 2%-3% pickup from M&A activity.
Because the business model is quite scalable, and we've been continuing to be focused around where we can find areas that we can use technology to increase that scalability, we think that you should see an incremental drop-through from an earnings perspective, and that gets us to 15%-20% earnings growth. Then if you look at the individual segments, so again, what I had talked about is, historically, we've grown our mobility segment 10%. We're saying 4%-8% on a go-forward basis. We've been very focused on how we can continue to bring in incremental customers. So we do business now with 19 million commercial vehicles globally, and when we bring in new business, we're really focused on how we can continue to deliver in a much more digitally enhanced way now than what we would have done historically.
More than 50% of our leads are coming through digitally, and those leads are coming through into the business, and that's a very wonderful engine that we have, and we will continue to have. On top of that, we've been really focused around areas of growth where we can increase our TAM exposure. One of those areas for us is the ability to purchase more than fuel, and we have a product that we have in the marketplace right now, where people can, not just buy fuel, but they can actually buy ancillary products.
We've combined our own internal closed-loop network with Mastercard's open-loop network, so as cards are getting reissued, they're getting reissued with the capability to pay for parking and to pay for tolls and for pay for all those vehicle-related services that our customers have said they actually would like to buy. On top of that, we have a beta product in the marketplace that allows our over-the-road customers to have access to our discount network. And so we're looking at areas like that, where we can bring in a whole new source of customer base and expose it to a new set of products that increases our TAM. So we feel really good about our long-term growth prospects in our mobility segment and the fact that we actually were looking at areas that we can increase that profile.
In the Corporate Payments segment, if you look back, we've grown 12% historically. Again, we've got a tremendous platform here. When we go into the marketplace, and we talk about our capabilities and our Embedded Payments products, it is a very strong product offering, and it is a product that works in a way that when we find new spend volume and move it through our base of business, that drops through very heavily from a profitability perspective. There's very little human touch involved in those transactions. The investments are more on the technology side. So what we're looking at with this part of the business is continuing to find new sources of spend volume and pushing that through the business the way that we have looked at historically, both in travel and then outside of travel.
And then we've been ramping in, Salesforce that's been selling a direct product as well. Those things are going to lead us to the 10%-15% long-term growth targets that we have. In our Benefits business, you've got some tremendous macro that sits behind that business. Those things include the fact that healthcare costs keep going up, to have an embedded positive inflation item that comes through. Account growth continues to be strong, and those account growth are coming from the market itself. We've seen this continued market movement to consumer-directed healthcare accounts. And as you get that, that shift to consumer-directed healthcare accounts, you've seen the portfolio grow. So account growth is another avenue for us. We also have incremental products that are cross-selling into this customer base: Corporate capability, Benefit Administration capability, Compliance capability.
The accounts themselves grow over time. So as a customer comes in, there's an account typically associated, and you have growth with that. And so those things lead to the 15%-20% long-term growth target. So again, I know we feel good about our growth prospects across all aspects of our business and are really focused on how we can continue to deliver the incremental volumes that we have historically and then look for new areas to spend across the business. So, you know, why we succeed? This is something that when we think about the things that are important to us, we've intentionally identified markets that are large and growing, and we are the market leader. So we've been focused around how we deliver products in the marketplace that are compelling for our customers.
If you kind of run across the business, we do business with nine of the 10 largest oil companies in the world in our mobility segment. We do business with eight of the 10 largest online travel agencies in our travel business, and we do business with over 50% of the Fortune 1000 across our benefit products. We've got really great customers across all, but we also do business with some of the smallest companies in the world, too. And so that's important to us as we continue to grow, is that we have this great growth engine that sits across our products, which has allowed us to grow in pretty much any environment. Again, the fact that we're a leader is important to us and is an area that we'll continue to invest in our existing capabilities.
The recurring revenue, so if you look across our product sets, people are using our products on a recurring basis. And what that means is that if you're a company that happens to have a vehicle, as an example, and you're using our product, you're typically using it seven times a month. It's a pretty predictable methodology of how we're seeing incremental revenue come through. In our benefits business, we're seeing SaaS fees associated with that, which again, is a very predictable model. In our corporate payments business, this is coming from a consistent transaction volume base, and so across the business, we have a very strong revenue recognition model. But the fact that it's recurring is a benefit, obviously, to us from a predictability standpoint.
All of these things create a great network effect, so as we are continuing to accrete, benefit from any of our different offerings, it's enabled us to continue to invest, and that has created some wonderful network effect, both in terms of cost profitability, but also in terms of innovation. Now, what we're able to do is we're taking our data and exposing it to AI, enabling us the cost savings, and we've talked a lot about that, where we've identified $100 million worth of run rate savings we expect to have by the end of this year. That's part of that network effect, being able to deploy, look for areas of savings or product capability and continue to invest. And that's all brought to life of the people.
You know, whenever I talk to a customer anywhere in the world, the first thing they'll talk about is the person that they are working with. And so, you know, people do business with other people, and we think that that's an important part of our, our product as well. That is it.
Thank you for that. We do have some time for Q&A. Maybe, Melissa, I'll just start out. One of the bigger announcements on the first quarter earnings call was the Booking.com contract.
Yes.
You've given a little bit more clarity of it, but can you just clarify kind of what the expectation is for the impact to revenue growth as we look out into next year?
Yeah, love to. So, just to kind of back up a bit. So in our Corporate Payments business, we have two products. We have an AP Direct product, and we have an Embedded Payments product. That Embedded Payments product is what our travel customers use. So when you are booking a hotel room, you're gonna pay the online travel agency with your consumer card, but we're making a payment on their behalf to all the hotels around the world. Very global product, it's used in over 200 countries. Our competitive advantages of the product, we have issuing and settlement capability across more than 20 different currencies. We have the ability to actually handle a huge volume of activity, including significant chargeback activities. We have been working with Booking for a long time, so we've had this great relationship with Booking.
We just had a contract renewal with them. We talked about this, and we wouldn't actually normally talk about this just because the way that the contract we renegotiated is different than what we've had in the past. Historically, whenever they've had a virtual card being used across their portfolio, it's been us. In this new environment, that's still true, so they're still using our technology across their portfolio when they're using a virtual card to make a payment on their behalf. What they've decided to do is insource some of the services. They are very unique and the fact that they own a bank, they have also some compliance structures that they've set up globally.
We have this global compliance structure, and so we worked with them to find this place where they'll continue to use our technology, but they're gonna in-source some of the services. And so what we talked about, if you look back over time, last year, I think that combining Expedia and Booking were 20% of the segment revenue. So it's like, you know, to the kind of like contain it. This is a very unique thing that we're doing with Booking, and we've said that in our guide, we provided a framework of we think how they're gonna adopt, but it was an estimate. So we think that they're going to go inside, in-source gradually through the third quarter.
We're fully in the fourth quarter, was our guide, expectation, and that we would see an incremental 1% headwind to our total revenue as a company next year. So it's, has an impact, and so we want to make sure we're talking about that. Now, at the same time, a very unique customer, and we feel really good about the relationship that we've built with them and the fact that we're looking at other pools of spend volume that we collectively can move into this program, which I think is gonna create long-term opportunity for us.
Just to follow up on that last point, there's new opportunities that you have with them. Is it geographies, other spend categories? Just talk a little bit about that and kind of what the roadmap is.
Yeah, and actually, like, if you zoom back out into the travel space, you know, travel is gonna continue to grow. So, like, we feel good about the, like, just the market growth from a travel perspective. You know, specifically, some of the areas in travel that we see opportunities still are, like, we do business with eight of the 10 largest online travel agents in the world. So looking at areas of spend where we're not in right now, which include certain geographies that we're not in right now, which our customers would like us to be in, so we've been working on acceptance in those locations.
They also have been interested in, there's been this migration industry-wide, particularly the European-based online travel agencies, to the merchant model, which means that that a consumer is paying the online travel agency instead of paying the hotel directly, which introduces our product, which creates an opportunity. So, so we've been working on collectively at where we can actually also increase penetration of their total spend volume, but look for areas that we're just not in at all right now. And so we're, we continue to be very bullish about this relationship long term.
Feel free to ask questions from the audience. Just if you can talk a little bit more about your initiatives to broaden the acceptance network and to expand mobility beyond fuel and what that means to your business.
Yeah. So, the work that we're doing, we're developing new products. We're looking at what's really important to our customers, what problems can we solve for our customers. This one was, like, a nearer-term one, is where our customers had said to us, we'd actually like, we like you. We like doing business with you. We would like actually to be able to buy more with you. And so we have worked with them to identify very specific product codes that they want to open up. So that what they've told us is, w e don't want to be able to buy everything, which actually we would prefer not either, 'cause then it becomes more of a general purpose credit card.
But there are certain categories that they would like to buy, and so we have taken our network, combined it with Mastercard's network. When these people go through the renewal process, the cards will get replaced in the U.S. with this new card. And even though we have a mobile app that people can use to pay for their services, most of the people still are using plastic. And what that then allows people to do is then go into those different categories and purchase things in a way that they haven't historically. So we feel like it's an easy way of meeting just an untapped market need that we have with those customers.
And so really, the big drivers are, you have to go through card reissuance cycles, in order to get adoption and education with our customers that they have the capability to do it. Yeah, I feel so much better sitting here today than I probably would've if I'd been here 10 years, like, a couple of years ago. You know, and I feel better because we have products in the marketplace. We have pricing in the marketplace. We have a lot more visibility into what people need and what they're willing to pay for. So the initial set of products that we've been highly focused on with our customers has been this idea that what they want to be able to do is integrate their ICE vehicles. 'Cause if you think about this, people are migrating parts of their portfolio.
They're not making this, like, rapid change, and so they want to be able to integrate their ICE vehicle data and information and their EV charging information in one set of data and one bill. And so we've been really focused on those products, so we created an acceptance network in the U.S., and we've got an acceptance network in Europe. People pay a subscription fee to get access to that network. So that was the first product we put into the marketplace, and people are paying like what we thought we'd do. Right now, on average, we earn between $5 and $20 per vehicle, and the average of that is $6.
We've said, you know, going forward, these new products we think will be in a similar range, and, and already we're in that range with that limited products that we have in the marketplace now. The second product we rolled out was at-home reimbursement capability. So we have a product in the U.S. that allows if someone is charging at home, their employee can get reimbursed into their personal account for that. And again, the data, which is really important to our customers, they can integrate the data back into their other vehicles so they can track the total cost of ownership for that vehicle.
And so the last part will be depot charging t hat will roll out into the marketplace this year, which will then, like, if you think about that, that's all the places that people can be using their EVs, and they already have the ability to do that with ICE integrated together. And then behind that, we have a product roadmap of a large number of things that we see as opportunities in this space that we think that we can actually continue to monetize on. So, you know, what we're hearing from our customers and, you know, adoption for us, like, I would say, we haven't seen a huge change in adoption trends. It wasn't in our space going really high, and it has, you know, it's still at a very small rate. Generally, it's government fleets. You know, we do business with the federal government.
We do business with over half of the state fleets. Those are early adopters, and some of the largest fleets that have sustainability commitments are the kind of on the early edge. And then there's a lot of toe dipping, where people are trying a product, you know, like ones and twosies, and they're just experimenting is what we're seeing right now. So we feel, I'd say, very good about where we sit competitively, the products that we have in the marketplace, the fact that we're earning what we thought we would earn in this space, and we've got, you know, great, you know, albeit small, but really great data to support that.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, and, and think about, like, everything that we're doing, there's gonna be an incremental subscription fee associated with that.
We see a lot of opportunity around affecting things like we do with an ICE vehicle. We're helping our customers look for lower-cost areas to actually fuel routing information. So there's a lot when you get into EV vehicles that, where the time of day you charge, where you charge, has a huge, you know, variability in cost. And so we think that there are a lot of problems that we can help solve for our customers over time. Right now, they're just focused on acceptance and just convenience and control with the existing offerings, and I think the next wave of things will be much more about efficiency.
Can you spend a little bit of time on M&A, what your strategy is? Talk a little bit more about Payzer, which you acquired last year and the opportunity.
Yeah. Yeah, so we've got 2%-3% in our long-term framework for M&A. You know, we've historically been very active in the space. We feel good about the acquisitions that we've done over the last few years. We've been more geared towards, i f you think about us historically, we've done scale acquisitions and growthy kind of acquisitions, which were things that we've looked at instead of building a product where we've purchased product capability. And this market, we've had a bias towards share buyback, and so we've been much more active from a share buyback perspective. And so we have a bias right now towards that. We are still going through the process of testing the thesis of Payzer, you know, which we're excited about.
So when we, when we think about the places that we're making investments, both organically and inorganically, we've been really focused around continuing to move up into that software layer, so we're more involved with all of the operations of our customers. And we're doing that as we build new products and roll into the marketplace. Payzer is interesting for us because you kind of jump up a couple of stops into that software layer. And so what we wanted to prove out in this thesis was do we have a right to cross-sell into our existing customers? We have 25,000 that sit in kind of that direct space of where Payzer plays, which is field service management, and where we can actually provide all of the integrated software tools that help them simplify the business of running their business.
So I'd say we're still really early in this process. We've had success of taking our existing customer base, giving it to Payzer, letting that team, you know, run and close on those. So we're still building our own capability of doing the reverse of where we're cross-selling you know that capability into with our sales force. But we're learning every week. We're getting better at that, and we feel good about the fact we're growing the asset. And so what is interesting for us is that we feel like Payzer is a good size, that we can test this thesis, and depending on how that goes, we could choose to either build more capability on that or do other M&A like that. And again, we're still in that evaluative stage right now.
All right. Thank you for that. Looks like we are just about out of time, so-
Thank you.
I want to thank everyone for coming. Thank you, Melissa.