All right, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started here. I'm John Davis, the Payments and Fintech Analyst here at Raymond James. We're excited to have Melissa Smith, CEO of WEX, along with Steve Elder, Head of IR, with us this afternoon. We're gonna start with a presentation, followed by kind of hybrid Q&A for myself and the audience. With that, I'll hand it over to Melissa.
Thank you. I'm not gonna stand behind the podium because I don't think you can see me. For those of you who don't know WEX, we're a B2B payment platform that is geared towards end markets that are large, growing, and we're a market leader. We set out on this journey about a year ago to really define the purpose for WEX. The purpose for us and how we think about the business is we wanna make sure we're simplifying the business of running the business.
Our customers are all businesses, and we wanna make sure that we're removing some of the friction that they have every day for running that business. We have an ecosystem of offerings. Think of this as we've got an integrated technology platform that is serving a number of different service verticals. Here's a snapshot of some of the products that we have. We wanna make sure that we're simplifying benefits.
For us, that means using our technology stacks to help allow people to use HSA, FSA accounts, a number of different tax-deferred accounts, where we're providing the technologies to make sure that people are buying things that they should buy, that are tax allowed. We're also focusing on mobility. Think of this as fleet customers that have vehicles as a byproduct of running a business that could be anywhere from a local contractor up to an over-the-road customer. Anybody in that category that as part of their business needs to own a fleet. We provide services to them to allow them to purchase fuel and do that in a very efficient way, as well as understand the total cost of ownership of their vehicle, which is migrating now into EV ownership.
On the pay- and- get- paid component, we offer embedded payments products and AP facilitation products, all again geared towards B2B customers. We do that, if you think about the underlying platform is making sure that we're doing that in a way that's reliable, scalable, and that we're doing that in a way that meets our customers where they are. So some of our customers are super technically available, in which case we're offering up an API that they can integrate to others are actually a little bit further down that journey, in which case we're embedding into their systems. One of our core capabilities about a third of the company are technologists. The great growth cycle, if you look back, you know, we first started at WEX, we were about $50 million in revenue.
You can see last year, $2.4 billion. We've had a really great growth record. We grew revenue 27% and earnings 48% last year. If you zoom out, our long-term growth framework says that we're gonna grow revenue 10%-15% and earnings 15%-20%. This tells you how we're gonna do it. We actually, if you go through each of our segments, we have this long-term growth framework for each segment that we're in. In addition to that, if you kind of zoom out instead, if you look across all the different categories, we're gonna grow 4%-5% from our existing customer base. Again, we're in large growing markets, and some of that is because the market itself is growing it. Some of that is because we're cross-selling across our portfolio.
That leads to that 4%-5% growth. Last year, we over-delivered on that. We had 14% growth in that category. Some of which was a pickup from just the pandemic rebounding. On net new customers, we're gonna grow 3%-5%. One of the things that are our core competencies is bringing in new customers across the business. We operate in a multi-channel approach, so each part of our business, we're going directly in and through partners. It's, again, another reliable part of the business model. The net of attrition, 3%-5%, we have very high retention rates across our portfolio. On average, last year, that was 4% growth. We are also delivering new products into our customer base, and that is bringing 1%-2% growth.
As we continue to go on that journey, we have a high degree of customer focus on our innovation. Those innovation capability for us has only increased as we've moved 80% of our technology base is in the cloud. It will be 100% of what we want to be in the cloud by the end of this year. M&A for us is 2%-3% of the overall growth profile, so that leads to the 10%-15% growth. As you see the scalability of the model, we have a really nice ability to drop through revenue to earnings, and that leads to the 15%-20% growth. The last thing I'd say is, like, why we succeed. When we look across each of the markets that we're in, we're operating again in large markets.
The, if you go across each of our verticals, our Fleet business operates across a large marketplace in the United States, in Europe, and in Australia. Our Health and Benefits offering also is in a really large market and growing. What we're doing is you all know B2B, the Corporate Payments marketplace is a very large market. Travel specifically also growing. We look across each of these categories-Large markets, we're in leadership position across if you go each of those categories. We do business with nine of the 10 of the largest oil companies in the world, eight of the 10 largest online travel agencies in the world, and we do business with over 50% of the Fortune 1000 with our Health and Benefit offerings. It's a really great business, reoccurring revenue stream.
Over 80% of the business is reoccurring in nature. As we build product capability, that is, you know, for us, a great network effect. We continue to build out functionality, we can offer it across the portfolio. We also get an effect of retaining the data that we have with each of the transactions. Over $200 billion worth of transaction volume went across our platform last year, and that created a whole data set where we're able to take the information that we're learning from customer behavior patterns and update and modify the overall profile that we have with our product set. The last thing, I'd always say that we have a great culture. The people that work at WEX, I think, make a difference every day, and that's part of why we have such great retention rates for their customers.
All right. Great.
My presentation.
We'll go into some Q&A now. I'll ask a few, and then if you have a question, just raise your hand and I'll call on you. Melissa, you talked about the impressive kinda growth algo at WEX of 15%-20%. You have the guide this year that is quite a bit below that. Maybe just at a high level, obviously there's multiple factors, but just kinda walk people through, you know, why we're looking kinda low-to-mid-single digits this year, at least as the initial guide. Maybe also touch on macro and any conservatism built in given all the uncertainty.
Sure. Love to. Our overall revenue growth again is 10%-15%. That's assuming neutral fuel prices and neutral FX. If you actually look at 2022 to 2023 and neutralize for fuel prices, we're in our normal range, albeit kind of on the low end of that. The reason why is that we had assumed in our guidance that we're gonna have a slow growth environment in the second half of the year. We're a little cautious because of all the uncertainty there is in the marketplace, but not because of anything we're seeing in our existing portfolio. We're just transparent about the fact that we assumed in our guidance in the second half of the year that there would be a slow growth environment in our underlying guidance.
Our Fleet segment's actually a really great, you know, look into the economy. So far what we've seen with fuel, look at our, what we call our local fleets, but people that buy gasoline at gas stations, so not the big over-the-road trucks going to truck stops. The activity there is, you know, is still robust. It's still growing, and part of that is just kind of recovering from the pandemic. There's absolutely no sign of any slowdowns at all in that right now, and they've done very, very well, and we've done well just bringing on new customers in there as well.
Then we'll touch on everybody's favorite topic, EVs. Just you guys have done some early steps in M&A. Maybe just talk about the EV strategy, how you kinda see a mixed fleet world, what that opportunity brings to WEX.
We have almost 19 million commercial vehicles that we do business with globally, and to kinda put it in perspective, 200 vehicles are using EV products within our portfolio. It's like we're very early in the adoption curve. What we're hearing from our customers, what they are interested in is an integrated offering that allows them to integrate their ICE- powered vehicles with EV vehicles, so they can understand the total cost of ownership of their fleet. They wanna have that payment mechanism and the billing integrated. It's creating this whole new opportunity for us in the marketplace to make sure that we can service their needs. The product offering that we've been focused on in the short term is really geared towards that.
Making sure that we have a network, closed-loop network that we build out in the ICE, with ICE vehicles, is making sure that we have that same ability with EV. We now have offerings in the United States and Europe that allow that capability, so people can charge it and fly as they go. We're building out functionality for depot charging at home reimbursement with the idea they're gonna have this one integrated offering back to our customers. You know, it's really early. The early adopters right now are largely, state fleets, government fleets, those who have ESG reporting requirements, that are kind of pushing for adoption, but really early.
What they're finding is they're going into the marketplace and trying to place orders, and it's a very long cycle for them to actually get possession of vehicles. It's dribbling in. The way that we've thought about this is that we wanna make sure that we're positioned for our customers kind of regardless of when it's gonna happen, 'cause it will happen over time. We're focused on creating products for this mixed fleet environment that we're gonna be in for probably 10+ years.
From an economic perspective, which is another question I get frequently, the economics right now are on our products. We charge between $3 and $20 per month per vehicle. In this new environment, we believe we're gonna be able to charge between $5 and $20 per month per vehicle. That's certainly playing out with the, you know, our sample size of 200 right now is that we're in the range that we had provided at Investor Day, even though we're offering actually just a small piece of functionality in the marketplace right now.
Okay. Maybe we'll a couple more questions on fuel. There's been a lot of talk. Obviously, spot rates are down a lot, and I get a lot of questions. You know, how does that interplay with your business? You know, is that a leading indicator or, you know, at the end of the day, if the miles are driven, you're still getting paid. Maybe talk a little bit about what happens when spot rates do go down and how that does impact your business as well.
Yeah, sure. In our Fleet segment, about a 1/3 of that portfolio are over-the-road customers. The rest are, think of, anybody who might have a vehicle, 'cause, think of it like a Ford F-250 that a contractor might have, or a florist or, a tree removal service. There's a whole host of type of vehicles that fit. That's the other 2/3 of the portfolio. The 1/3, that piece of the business, larger carriers aren't affected as much by spot rates, but smaller carriers are. It's part of what makes the, that part of the business a little bit more cyclical. We did see spot rates decline pretty rapidly last year.
What happened kind of third quarter-ish of last year was that the people that owned smaller fleets, were parking vehicles and starting to work for the larger transport providers, and you started to see kind of this mix shift. In the fourth quarter, you started to see, for us, same-store sales within that part of the portfolio was -3%. To your point, it started to affect miles driven compared to the kinda height of the pandemic. We've seen that continue into this year. As Steve said, if you look across our portfolios, we're seeing strength across, you know, the business similar to, you know, what we had projected going into the quarter. This too, similar to what we had projected going into the quarter, but is soft.
We do hear from that customer base that, they expect to see pickup in the second half of the year. We'll see if that plays out or not, but I think they're actually feeling pretty bullish. From looking at the overall portfolio, we've seen that really stabilize even starting at the latter part of last year. You have anything to add to that?
I think, I mean, just spot rates in general, there's no direct correlation to us, but, you know, in what they indicate in terms of demand for trucking services would, you know, kind of be a look into that one-third of the Fleet segment that is over-the-road trucks.
Okay. That's helpful. Maybe last one on the Fleet segment. You know, credit losses were a little bit higher in 2022 than I think you initially expected. I think you're calling for kinda flattish credit losses this year. Maybe just talk about what drove that up. I know there was some fraud involved and kinda the outlook for credit going into 2023.
Sure. Embedded in those numbers that you saw up there was an elevated credit loss number in 2022. There were two things that drove that. First, we saw a much higher level of fraudulent activity across the portfolio, which was driven in part because, you know, as you've seen chip adoption happen within the local fueling locations, you've seen more of that migrate to the over-the-road marketplace, the truck stop locations. Been a lot of work between us and the, you know, three merchants that are more dominant in that space to make sure that we're providing protection for those customers, and we're rolling out more products for those, that customer base.
We guided saying we think that the fraud losses we had in the fourth quarter would be similar in first quarter and then trail down in the course of the year. I'd say that's the minor. The other piece is credit exposure and different credit perspective. In the very last part of last year, similar to what was happening with spot rates, you started to see those small over-the-road customers. It's really small in size, over-the-road customers started to have trouble with the drop in spot rates and the increase in fuel prices. We had seen an increase in charge-offs that were occurring with that, like one very small part of the portfolio.
Overall, if you look at our credit portfolios, we continue to see stability and strength, with the exception of this one piece, which is the over-the-road small business customers. When we provided guidance for the year for this, we assumed that we would continue to see that bubble run through in the first half of the year. Again, the second half of the year, we're assuming that there is a low growth environment, so there would just naturally be a little bit of elevated losses associated with that.
Okay, great. Then maybe moving to the Corporate and Travel segment. You know, I get a lot of questions on just the competitive landscape there. I think it's pretty opaque for a lot. Obviously, it's a huge market. You guys have dominated in travel for a while. Maybe just talk about, you know, who you see there, what the competitive landscape looks like. Steve, maybe just touch a little bit on yields and then why that's been trending down over the last year or so.
Sure. If you look in that business, you talked about Travel, that we've been a dominant player in the travel marketplace. We've really benefited as you've seen the rebound in Travel. Our customer, again, in that case, is an online travel agency. If you were to book a hotel room, you would book that with an online travel agency, you would pay with your consumer card, and then we have an integrated payment that's happening that's making a payment to the hotel on behalf of the online travel agency. Highly integrated from a workflow perspective into their systems. That's what we call an embedded payments product. We've seen really great growth in that product set. Importantly, because we own the underlying, the infrastructure. We're the issuer, we're also the processor. We own the card management system.
It's a very scalable part of our model. It's something that we do, highly reliably, which is really important, as you might imagine, to that customer. They wanna make sure that that transaction's happening anywhere around the world, and it's happening very reliably, and so it's an important part of our model. From a competitive perspective, I'd say, like the competitors are similar to the way that they have been, you know, for, you know, quite some time. The competition comes from financial institutions which are largely regionalized. You see pressure in each area, with different FIs, depending what market you're talking about. I'd say that's the primary competitor there. That same embedded payments products that we use, for the online travel companies, we do a bunch of other things related to that, which is about cross-currency and capability.
We also provide that functionality for other fintech companies, which again, they're taking a work stream, embedding a payment into that work stream and, we monetize that together. There's a share between us and them of what we earn for interchange. That part of the marketplace can, you know, I would say again, competitively, not many big changes in that marketplace. It's been a competitive part of the business. The reason why we win in that space, again, is reliability that we have and the ability to provide all the services. Instead of just one component of that, it's the ability to be the issuer, the processor, and owning the card management system.
If you go to the second part of Travel and Corporate Payments in that segment, we have an direct AP offering that we have in the marketplace. We do that both directly and with a sales force that we've been building. We do that through partners where we provide the technology to them. In that case, it's largely financial institutions. We bring in business in both of those cases. I would say no real big changes in the competitive environment for, you know, a while across that space.
From a rate perspective, the net interchange rate, the segment itself earns about 90% of the revenue from interchange, right? We're the issuing banks. We earn the issuing bank interchange as published by Mastercard or Visa, we share a portion of it back with our customers. Since it's most of the revenue, it does get a bit of scrutiny. What we've seen over the last couple of years is we have a number of, you know, very large relationships with online travel companies who as you would expect, get good rates. As the rebound has occurred in Travel, the net rate that we report has trended down over time because of the mix of it all.
If you look at it on an individual basis, the actual rates that we earn from our portfolio of Travel customers and our Corporate Payments customers have been relatively steady. We were lucky enough to bring on one large fintech last year in our Corporate Payment side. Again, they got a preferential rate, I'll call it, and that rate trended down a little bit over the over the year from a mix perspective. You know, largely it's been pretty stable over the last couple of years, and you just get some mix issues in how we report it out.
Okay. I think you guys guided the segment to 7%-11% growth, which is slightly below the kinda targeted range. Obviously, you grew really well last year on the COVID rebound. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, kind of from a macro perspective, is some of that just comps and, you know, a little bit of uncertainty later this year? Then maybe talk a little bit about your Asia exposure through eNett and Optal and kind of where we are on that recovery, and could that provide a little bit of juice or upside this year?
The 7%-11%. Again, we have this underlying assumption that you're going to have a low growth environment in the second half of the year, and that would affect some of the incentive structures that we'd have compared to 2022, which is why we're guiding in that range. We are continuing to see strength that's coming through right now, you know, in that, in the business. That's an assumption that we have in a forward view. In terms of Travel in general. If you look at pro forma 2019, so assuming that we own eNett and Optal, compared to what happened last year, we were around 100% of the total spend pro forma back to 2019.
Transaction volume was still below the 2019 levels in room rates. Now because the bulk of what we're doing, our hotel payments were higher. Making up some, for some of the, we're still not seeing a full rebound in transaction volume with, you know, rate pickup. If you look at, you know, across the world at the different parts of the world that we do business with, about 20% of the volume historically has come from Asia- Pac. It was only about 10%-12% in the fourth quarter coming through. To your point, there's still some pent-up demand, we believe, in that part of the marketplace. Also in other parts of the market, we think there's probably a little bit of pent-up demand too.
No, that's helpful. Maybe before I move to the Health segment, any audience questions?
Oh, got a question.
Is there any opportunity to do merchant acquiring maybe in other markets and then building out that side of the business at all, or is that just not part of the strategy?
When we've looked across the different product offerings to have, we've made choices of where we're using closed-loop network and where we're using an open-loop network. Because of just the size of the acceptance base that's happening globally, we've chosen to use an open-loop network with our, you know, Travel products. You know, so far, that's really the path that we've chosen to go down.
Maybe switching gears over to the Health segment here. Obviously, with higher rates, it's gotten a lot more focus from investors recently. Just talk about obviously, you've guided to 25%-30%, which is well above kind of where you guys target. How much is that from rates? How much is just the core underlying business, new wins? Maybe just a few comments there would be helpful.
It's a great part of our model. When we first entered the Health and Benefits business, we had about $85 million worth of revenue in 2014. If you flash forward, last year, we had a little over $500 million. It's a compounded annual growth rate of over 20% and from 2014 to 2022, for a long period of time. You said that we're gonna grow. Our long-term growth targets here are 15%-20%, but we've had expectation in 2023 for that to be higher, 25%-30%. About half of that is coming because we became a custodian a couple of years ago, and so we're earning interest income with those custodian assets.
About half of that growth rate is coming from that as you see an increase in interest rates, and then just we're bringing more of those deposits into the business. The other half is coming from growth in existing accounts. We had a really great open enrollment season. You can see then from a selling perspective, we'd really over-delivered going into this year. Strong account growth that's coming through as a result of that. In addition to that, you just have this nice tailwind that comes behind this business, is you've got this migration to consumer-directed healthcare accounts, and you've got growth within account base. You've got health costs going up over time. All of those things can accumulate to the rest of the growth.
Okay, great. Maybe we'll turn to the balance sheet. Obviously, M&A is a big part of the story. You know, leverage, I think it's about 2.5 x, very comfortable. Maybe talk about where you're kinda willing to go for the right deal, what you're looking for, and have you seen any changes in valuations? Obviously, Stripe sent some shock waves to the market recently in kind of their last raise. Have you seen the private market valuations come down at all yet? Kinda still waiting. Just any comments there would be helpful.
Yes. Our target leverage range is 2.5x-3.5x . We're now just a tad below that. You know, just kind of if you step back and look at capital allocation, the way that we think about it, first internal capital. You know, we care about the fact that we're delivering products in the marketplace that are meaningful to our customers. The second thing that you saw in our framework up there is 2%-3% growth is coming from M&A. That being said, we're very patient acquirers. We have been going through and will continue to go through a process where we evaluate assets compared to both our strategic and financial criteria. If you look at the places that we've been interested, we're interested in EV and innovation.
Largely, though, we're making investments in that because we've got some early-stage companies. We're also engaged in looking at assets that are in the travel and Corporate Payment space, as well as assets that sit in the Health and Benefits business, either scale plays or product extensions. It is a very rigorous progress. We're moving assets through that pipeline. I think you're seeing different things. Corporate Payments in particular, there's still a gap we're finding between, you know, in my mind, like bid and ask, but public company comps and private comps, you know, patients looking at that. We've had a bias towards building in that part of the business, you know, for a while as a result of that.
You know, it's in more normal multiples in the rest of the portfolio of assets that we're looking at. That's just a normal process for us. We'll continue to evaluate assets. We'll talk and move those forward. In the meantime, one of the things that we did last year, we started more actively doing share buybacks. You know, we feel strongly about our stock and that we still believe that it is undervalued. As a result, we were moving asset to share buyback. We will continue to do that opportunistically. We actually increased the amount of authorization that we had in share buyback.
We had done a bunch of modeling and really felt comfortable even in a recession model that we could do both because we have such a high cash flow generation business that we could opportunistically continue to buy back stock and do M&A. Lot going on that front. Anything to add?
No, I just think that we were aggressive buying back shares last year. It was almost $300 million that we bought back last year, and we have just under $500 million authorization still left.
Okay. We're about out of time. Any last questions, from the audience? All right. We'll, wrap it there. Thanks once again.
Thank you.
Thank you.