Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to American Express's 2022 Investor Day. It's great to see many of you in the room. We also appreciate those of you that are joining us via webcast today. My name is Vivian Zhou. I'm the head of Investor Relations at American Express. Our discussion today contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance, which are based on our current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are included in today's presentation slides, which could be found at American Express's Investor Relations website. You also have a card in front of you with a QR code that will take you directly to our presentation today. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Squeri. Thank you, Vivian. Welcome, everybody. It's good to see people in general. You know, many of us have met over the last two years via video and looks like some of you put on some weight, gotta tell you. Talking about you, Sanjay. Anyway, welcome. It's good to see everybody here today, and for those of you that are joining us via video. As I said, it's our first in-person Investor Day meeting since 2019, and actually, our first in-person meeting. We just really opened up the building full-time this week. So it's our first in-person meeting since the pandemic began. We planned this session several months ago, well before the recent events in Eastern Europe. Before we get to the presentations we have planned, I'd like to make some comments about our response to the crisis in Ukraine. I'll start by providing some context about our business in Russia, which is small, consisting of one partner that issues cards and a handful that acquire merchants for payment transactions. We've been moving quickly to comply with all sanctions imposed by the U.S. and international governments. In addition, just over a week ago, we announced that we are suspending all operations in Russia and Belarus. The suspension of our business in those countries is not material to either our short or long-term results. With that said, I'd like to take a moment to talk about what's most important, and it's not the impact on our business, but the impact of this attack on the Ukrainian people. Like the rest of the global community, we are shocked and saddened by the devastating human suffering we've seen over the past few weeks. Throughout the crisis, our primary focus has been on supporting our colleagues and customers in the region and to provide humanitarian aid to those who are suffering the effects of this war. We don't have any colleagues in the Ukraine, but we do have many colleagues with family and friends there who are impacted by this crisis. We also have hundreds of colleagues in the surrounding region, as well as several dozen in Russia, and we're doing all we can to support them and ensure their safety. We've also been working hard to back our customers affected by the crisis. For example, we've assisted customers with travel arrangements to help them evacuate their employees and other stakeholders in affected areas, and we'll continue to do whatever we can to support them as well. Finally, we are contributing aid to a number of organizations that are providing critical relief to people in the Ukraine and neighboring countries impacted by this crisis, and we're matching colleague donations globally. We're also working with our partner, Hilton, to donate up to 1 million hotel rooms, hotel room nights across Europe to support Ukrainian refugees and first responders who are helping them out. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by this crisis, and we join the international community in continuing to hope for peace. American Express has been around for 172 years, and throughout our history, we have always managed our business with an eye to the future. Keeping our focus on growth over the medium to long term, even as we deal with near-term challenges, is embedded in the DNA of how we run our business. It's how we've successfully managed through all kinds of crises, including, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, only to emerge stronger on the other side. We remain confident in our growth in our 2024 growth aspirations, despite the uncertainty in the environment due to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. With that in mind, I wanna give you the opportunity to better understand our plans for long-term growth and to answer your questions. Here's our agenda for today. I'll kick things off with a high-level overview about why we're confident we can achieve our growth aspirations that we introduced on our earnings call in January. I ask members of our senior leadership team to focus on specific areas of the business that are most important to achieving our long-term growth aspirations as opposed to their overall business plans. They'll discuss the key opportunities they see ahead and how they're planning to capitalize on those opportunities to drive sustainable growth across the enterprise. First up is Anna Marrs, who leads our Global Commercial Services business. Anna will discuss how we're planning to continue to expand and grow our SME business globally. Next, Howard Grosfield, who runs our U.S. Consumer Services, will discuss how we're continuing to expand our position as a premium lifestyle brand by innovating our value propositions to drive generational relevance. Doug Buckminster, who leads our consumer businesses globally, will join us for the Q&A. Next, Raymond Joabar, who heads our Global Merchant and Network Services business, will walk you through how coverage expansion and the modernization of our network are helping to drive our growth globally. Anré Williams, who previously ran our merchant business and is now overseeing both our U.S. banking operations and our enterprise services group, will talk about how our technology and customer servicing capabilities are powering our growth and delivering efficiency for the enterprise. Finally, Jeff Campbell, our CFO, will put it all together from a financial perspective to show you why we feel confident in our ability to deliver the higher revenue and EPS aspirations we have put forth in our growth plan. Then we'll finish up today's discussions with the Q&A session. Here are some of the key questions that my colleagues and I will address today. Why are we confident we can achieve the long-term growth aspirations that we announced in January? What are the competitive advantages of our business model? How are those advantages driving our growth? And what can enable us to deliver sustainable growth over the long term? Let me address the first question. Why are we confident we can achieve our growth aspirations? On the right, you see our revenue and EPS growth aspirations for 2024 and beyond. Our confidence in our ability to achieve these aspirations is based on three interrelated factors. First, the strategy we've been pursuing over the past several years, which focuses on investing in our brand, customers, value propositions, coverage, technology, and talent to build share, scale, and relevance is working. The successful execution of that strategy has led to the momentum we've been generating in areas that we believe are key to sustainable long-term growth, including customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. In addition, our momentum is being helped by a number of structural shifts, including the continued growth of online commerce and digital engagement trends among consumers, the growth of the premium consumer space, growth and creation of small businesses, and the accelerating digitization of payments within the commercial sector. These structural shifts are being factored into our strategy as the environment and the opportunities we see continue to evolve. What are the competitive advantages of our business model that we believe will help us achieve our aspirations for the longer term? Our business model gives us a range of advantages that put together are difficult for others to replicate. Starting on the left, we have a brand that for over 170 years has stood for trust and security. Two enduring qualities that cannot be manufactured. They have to be earned. These are qualities that resonate with customers globally, across generations, and through both good and challenging times. An important part of our brand promise is service excellence, which is much broader than solving a dispute or checking on a payment. The things we've done so well that we've won the J.D. Power Award for U.S. credit card satisfaction 11 times out of the past 15 years. We go much further than that. Continuing to demonstrate day in and day out that we have our customers' backs in all kinds of circumstances, from everyday issues to the times that matter most. We are there when our customers need us. We have so many examples of when customers are in trouble, such as being stranded in a different country or when they're a victim of a robbery, and the first call they make is to us. I don't have any other company where this is the case. We also have a membership model that is not only unique in our industry, it is unique, period. Many of our customers don't see themselves as simply having or using American Express cards. They feel they are with American Express. They have an emotional connection to our brand and the products and services we offer. Our card members are proud of their association with us. I often have people tell me how long they've been a member when I first meet them. I've been a member since nineteen eighty-one," or, "I've been a member since twenty-twenty," and they'll say it, and they say it with pride. Over time, we've continuously evolved our membership model by adding more offerings, benefits, experiences, and digital solutions to meet the changing needs and expectations of our customers. As we've done this, we've expanded beyond our traditional strengths in travel and entertainment into differentiated lifestyle offerings for consumers, which Howard will talk about, and business-centric solutions to our SME customers, which Anna will speak to. These continued enhancements are helping to deepen customer relationships and engagement. Our brand, service excellence, and membership model have enabled us to build a large premium customer base at scale that is unrivaled among our competitors and is attractive to our partners, with millions of consumer and business customers across generations and geographies who spend on average three times more on American Express cards versus other networks. At the foundation of our business model is our network, which gives us end-to-end relationships with card members and merchants. This provides us with data and analytics that enable us to deliver differentiated value to our customers through compelling and relevant value proposition innovations, as well as our industry-leading fraud, credit, and servicing capabilities, and our ability to provide higher spend capacity. It also drives value to our merchants who are eager to grow their businesses by providing exclusive partner-funded offerings and experiences to our high-spending consumer and business customers. What's not on this slide, but what is a critical factor in driving all aspects of our business model and ensuring it continues delivering competitive advantages is our people. Their experience, creativity, and talent are the reasons behind our success, and as a result, our people are highly sought after by our competitors around the world. I've talked about our competitive advantages. Now let's talk and let's take a look at how these advantages are actually driving our growth. The collective assets of our business model, combined with the strategy we've been pursuing to grow our business, have driven increases in customer acquisitions, engagement, and retention, all of which are critical to delivering sustainable growth over the long term. For example, the growth in card acquisitions we saw through 2021 show that our value propositions are resonating with customers, attracting younger age cohorts and SMEs to our premium offerings. In fact, 75% of new Platinum and Gold consumer Card acquisitions in 2021 came from millennials and Gen Z customers. We had one of our best years ever in acquiring SMEs, where we remain the leading card provider. The ongoing innovations in our value propositions and digital capabilities are also leading to growth in customer engagement. In particular, online and card-not-present spending, one of the structural shifts I mentioned earlier, continued its strong growth, up 31% in Q4 over 2019. The continued expansion of compelling membership offerings, along with our world-class customer service, are also contributing to continued strong customer retention, which remains higher than pre-pandemic levels and is above 98% in our global consumer business and 97% in our SME business. How does this all come together to deliver sustainable long-term growth? Simply put, our business model is a virtuous cycle that continues to grow through the execution of our strategy, which drives share, scale, and relevance that can lead to long-term sustainable growth. Here's how it works. We start with our strategy of investing at high levels in the categories you see on the left. This high level of investment produces a steady stream of value proposition innovations and new capabilities designed to meet the evolving needs and preferences of our card members. That differentiated value attracts a broader array of new premium customers and deepens the engagement with our existing customers. These high-spending card members attract more merchants and partners to our ecosystem who add value for our customers through exclusive offerings and experiences. This additional value makes our membership model even more compelling. As this virtuous cycle continues, it grows and produces more investment capacity that we use to continue feeding our value creation engine, which in turn means more card members, more merchants, and more partners, and so it goes. Driving all of this is our 65,000 colleagues all around the world, whose sole focus when they come to work every day is on powering this virtuous cycle, which can deliver higher levels of broad-based revenue growth and scale that increases efficiency and produces ongoing operating expense leverage. Combined, those two things can give us the platform for sustainable mid-teen EPS growth over the long term. I hope that gives you a high-level perspective of why we feel confident in our strategy and our ability to deliver on our longer-term growth plan aspirations. Now my colleagues will discuss the opportunities we see in each of our businesses and some of the specific strategies we're pursuing to continue our momentum in driving our virtuous cycle to help us achieve our aspirations in 2024 and beyond. With that, Anna Marrs is first up, who will talk about our global SME business. All right. Well, thank you, Stephen. It's great to be with everybody here today. I joined American Express three and a half years ago, and when I joined, and I got to know our SME franchise, I saw scale in a business that serves over 3 million small businesses in the U.S. I saw the strength of our core card business, and I saw opportunity to become even more essential to our customers through expanding into products beyond the card. What I certainly did not see was that there was a global pandemic on the horizon that would test our customers and our business in unprecedented ways. I have to confess, in the early days of the pandemic, as we saw delinquencies begin to trend up, I saw an uncertain picture. Today, I see a very different picture for our SME business. I see a bright picture. I see strong momentum coming into 2022 across billed business, revenue, and important customer metrics. I see a long runway for growth on the back of both external trends and opportunities within our customer base. I see we are driving forward to accelerate on the runway that we have with small businesses. In this presentation, I wanna show you why I see that bright picture, so let's get into it. Okay, first, a note on the scope of this presentation. Although my remit at American Express is broader, today, I'm going to focus on small businesses. Why is that? The reason is because small business plays an important role in our growth aspiration. You can see here that our SME franchise accounts for 40% of the company's overall billed business. Small business is a major focus for me. In both the U.S. and international, small business makes up 86% of Global Commercial Services. Today I'm gonna cover 4 topics in that overall small business scope. I'll cover the competitive advantages that have driven the scale and growth in U.S. SME. I'm going to cover the actions we took through the pandemic to build on our leadership position. I'm gonna cover the proof points that give us confidence that SME payments have a long runway for growth, and I'll cover the priorities we're executing against to capture on that SME opportunity. Let me begin with a few key facts that showcase the strength of our U.S. SME franchise. We generated over $350 billion of billed business in 2021. We captured 45% of all small business spending on cards in the U.S., and we're 3 times larger than our next competitor. Now, we often get asked the question, what's behind the scale and growth of your U.S. SME business? My answer is always the same. We believe we have 5 fundamental advantages that are unique to American Express. These advantages enable us to deliver unparalleled value to our customers, and taken together, these advantages are extremely difficult for our competitors to replicate. Let me touch on each. One advantage we have in small business is the American Express brand. We have a 170-year heritage that is synonymous with trust, security, and service excellence. Our brand resonates deeply with small businesses. In fact, nearly three-quarters of U.S. small businesses would consider having an American Express business card. When they do, our Net Promoter Score, which is a key metric of customer satisfaction, is 22 points higher than the other cards they have in their wallet. Our brand is a core strength. We leverage our brand to attract and retain small business customers, and we leverage our brand to compete effectively with a wide range of players, from traditional banks to fintechs. Another advantage we have is the scale and quality of our U.S. SME customer base. As I mentioned earlier, we serve over 3 million small businesses in the U.S. These customers are very high credit quality. 80% of AR balances come from customers with a FICO score above 720, and these customers are well-diversified. Our AR balances are made up of businesses that represent 27 industry sectors. To give you a flavor, we have a large-scale construction company based in Seattle, and we have a dentist running her practice in the Florida Keys. This diversification makes the overall portfolio very resilient to macro stresses, or in the case of the last two years, to a global pandemic that hit T&E industries hard. Restaurants, for example, make up only 3% of our overall portfolio. The scale of our customer base means we can expand relationships with additional products, and the quality of our customer base is an advantage as we run and grow this business. Another advantage is created by our leading small business card products. We offer a wide range of cards, from fee-based high-value products like the Business Platinum Card to simple cashback products to our co-brands with Amazon, Delta and Lowe's. We offer valuable benefits, spanning business benefits in areas like technology, wireless and shipping, best-in-class T&E benefits and benefits that are co-funded by partners who are seeking access to our valuable customer base. We offer an industry-leading Membership Rewards program, an important aspect of our value proposition, both from the ability to earn rewards and also to redeem them on a number of redemption options, ranging from booking travel to paying with points on Amazon. Altogether, we offer superior value propositions for our small business customers. Another advantage is our large, multi-channel, well-tuned marketing engine. We've leveraged the power of these channels to attract more than 600,000 new business accounts in 2021 alone, and we have a scaled set of capabilities enabling us to offer both upgrades and new products to existing customers. By leveraging these assets, we were able to reach or offer a new product or service to over 1 million small business customers last year. Underpinning all of this is the same disciplined approach to underwriting and investment optimization that we leverage across the company. Now, my team and I, as you can imagine, spend a lot of time studying fintechs, including the many business card startups that are out there. When I reflect on the scale of our marketing engine, I'm confident this will remain a competitive advantage that is very difficult to replicate. The final advantage I wanna touch on is American Express's unique integrated model. Our model drives two very important aspects of our value proposition for small businesses. We can deliver more spending power. Our integrated model enables us to give customers the spending capacity that they need while managing our risk. For example, for our largest U.S. small business customers, we're able to provide spending capacity that's three times greater than other card issuers. We can also deliver a network of buyers and suppliers. We work with our buyers to understand who their suppliers are, and then we target and onboard those suppliers who currently do not accept our cards, thereby growing the network. These core advantages powered strong growth in our SME business before the pandemic. We saw this growth particularly in what we call goods and services spending, which is small businesses buying what they need to run and grow their business, whether it's raw material, shipping or advertising. You can see the strength and resilience of our SME business even before the pandemic, with billions mostly in goods and services in both the U.S. and international, and with both growing strongly, particularly in international. Now, let's go back to that frequently asked question: What's behind the scale and growth of your U.S. SME business? To recap my answer, it's our world-class brand, our strong customer base, our diverse product set, our powerful marketing engine, and our integrated model. These advantages have been with us for years. Any one of them is a competitive strength. Taken together, they both protect and build on our leadership position. Let's go to the actions that we took through the pandemic to build on those advantages. We made a number of investments to aid our customers through the global health crisis. The actions we took drove retention, drove engagement, and as we came out of the crisis, drove acquisition. Let me give you a few examples. One of the retention actions we took to support our SME customers with relevant product value to make up for the loss of T&E utility as everybody stayed home. We invested $250 million. We rolled out a series of business-focused benefits to meet our customers' evolving needs. We included statement credits for purchases on wireless, shipping, and technology. We reinforced that our cards are powerful business spending tools, and we saw strong engagement with these offers, with over 1 million U.S. small business customers accessing these benefits. We also stood up very rapidly the financial relief program in 2020. We wanted to manage our credit risk through the pandemic, but we also wanted to retain those businesses who are able to pivot and survive the crisis. Now, Stephen and Jeff have shared over the years the size of the financial relief program, but the program also had a very positive impact on our ability to retain customers. You can see here that 90% of small businesses who enrolled in our financial relief program said their perception of American Express had improved as a result of this program. Another set of actions focused on engagement to deepen our relationships with customers throughout the pandemic. We provided small businesses with greater payment flexibility and delivered new features like Pay Over Time. We made strategic acquisitions with Kabbage and a company that enabled us to launch new beyond the card products, including a flexible line of credit and AP automation tools. We also launched the American Express business checking account. We rolled out our largest ever Shop Small program in 2020 with a $200 million commitment to help jumpstart spending at small businesses hurt by the pandemic. Another action we took was to ramp up our acquisition engine. Let me give you an example with our Business Platinum Card. The Business Platinum portfolio was very healthy coming into the crisis, growing in the high single digits. However, our customers' needs changed, and we wanted to reposition that product's value proposition. In short, we want it to be the best card for travel and for business, and we did this in a few key ways. First, we delivered benefits that would be especially appealing for our larger customers' business spending needs. Second, we injected differentiated business focus value into the card, focused on areas like technology, recruiting, and software, places where we saw our customers investing. Third, we built on our strong foundation of travel benefits and features. As we did all of this, we also priced for the value we were embedding, and we increased the fee to $695 a year. To date, the refresh has been very positively received, with new account acquisition up 158% in the fourth quarter of last year. Taken together, these actions enabled us to exit 2021 with very strong momentum in this very large portfolio, with goods and services spending growing and the T&E benefits retained just in time for travel to recover. As you can see, by building on our strengths, we create a powerful momentum on multiple fronts. We achieved customer retention levels of 97% at the end of 2021. We achieved strong customer engagement with 65% of small businesses using their card benefits, a level we maintained before the pandemic. We achieved strong momentum with billed business acquired, which is a rolling projection of the first year spend from new customers, increasing 83% in the fourth quarter of 2021 versus the average in 2019. When I reflect on these achievements, I've rarely seen a business with so much momentum. What's even more exciting is the long runway for growth we see ahead. Let's move to the next section. What are the proof points that give us confidence in our long runway for growth? One proof point is the strength of small business formation and growth. You might be surprised to learn that coming out of the pandemic, there are more businesses opening and they're growing. Small business applications were up 23% last year, and 60% of small business owners are confident in the future. They have strong momentum, and they expect continued strong sales growth. This highly dynamic and resilient sector represents a promising growth opportunity for us, both with prospects and existing customers. Another proof point in our long runway for growth is how SME payments are digitizing. We saw this trend accelerate through the pandemic. U.S. SME payments are growing from about $8 trillion in 2019 to $11 trillion in 2026. Importantly, the payment methods that U.S. SMEs are using are also changing as small businesses are moving away from manual checks to other types of digital payments, whether card, ACH or wire. As that more than $1 trillion of check volume digitizes over the next few years, we can capture more of small businesses' digital spending, both with our cards and our beyond the card products. Another proof point for our runway for growth is our small business relationships in themselves. I shared earlier that the American Express small business customer base has been an advantage for the scale and growth of our business. However, today, most of our customers have just one product with us, a charge card. That presents a tremendous opportunity to grow our customer relationships. Working capital is just one growth opportunity that we see. Today, we have a 45% share of all U.S. card-based spending, but a 20% share of U.S. card-based lending. We've begun to build momentum against this opportunity. Card member loans are up 25% since before the pandemic. When we build this momentum, we reap benefits for our business. When a customer has more than one need served by American Express, for example, both a charge card and a loan, we see a meaningful uplift in revenue. Another proof point is the trend of small businesses wanting more but also wanting less. They want more capabilities, but they want fewer providers, less logins, and less hassle. For example, more than 40% of small business owners said their ideal would be to bundle multiple financial services products under a single provider, and 65% value the consolidation of payments and financing solutions. American Express has a broad range of products, both on the card and beyond the card, and we're well-positioned to provide small businesses with integrated solutions from a single source that they trust. The final proof point in our runway for growth is our international franchise. You can see on the left that we had good goods and services momentum before the pandemic coming in and growing. You can see that we've returned to those strong levels coming out of 2021. On the right, our single-digit SME penetration in key countries provides us with a significant growth opportunity. Those are our proof points. From the external trends I cited, like payment digitization to opportunities within our own business, you can see why we're confident in the long runway for growth. How will we capture the SME growth opportunity? Let me walk you through these five strategic priorities that we're executing against to win. One priority is to continue fueling and innovating in our powerful marketing engine. What does that mean? It means sustaining our investment levels and focusing on premium acquisition. It means balancing our marketing between customers and prospects. It means leveraging the diverse channels I spoke about earlier, including our efficient digital channels where the majority of our acquisition comes today. It means building greater awareness of the benefits our business cards deliver. One of our marketing priorities is to educate small businesses about the many products and features that we offer that can help them run and grow their business. In summary, we want them to put their business spend on a business card. When a small business has a consumer card and gets one of our business cards, we see a 47% increase in their billings. Another priority is to capture more goods and services spending, and our cards are a powerful tool to do this. Take again, Business Platinum. I shared this is a large and growing portfolio. Last October, when we launched the new card, we built in enhanced benefits, like the ability to earn 1.5 times Membership Rewards on purchases in top business categories, as well as on any large purchases over $5,000. Customers can also get up to $1,000 of statement credits from partners like Dell and Adobe. The new card comes with payment flexibility built in with Pay Over Time. We offer all this in addition to the best-in-class travel benefits that we're known for. We've rolled out an even more powerful business tool with our new Business Platinum Card. Early results are strong, with new business acquired up 166% in Q4 2021 versus the same period in 2019. Another priority is to capture more goods and services spending with our capabilities beyond the card. While we know the card will remain the highest margin type of business payment, the reality is that as that iceberg of check volume melts, not all of it will go on the card. We're positioning ourselves so we can handle our customers' full AP file. We're doing this through proprietary AP automation products such as One AP, our network capabilities that include tokenization, and our direct relationships with merchants who also serve as suppliers. When Raymond Joabar presents shortly, you'll hear more about the network capabilities that his team is building to support this opportunity. We're also partnering with fintechs and other players to capture more spending beyond the card, including Airbase, which offers an end-to-end expense management solution, and Extend, which provides an easy-to-use virtual card platform. These capabilities enable us to capture that melting iceberg of the paper check, both beyond and on the card. After adopting one of our AP automation solutions, we see a 43% average lift in American Express card spending, showcasing how our beyond the card offerings also reinforce our card business. Another priority is to do more business with the customers we have, and there's a big opportunity here in providing more working capital. I shared earlier that we have a 45% share of U.S. SME card-based spending and a 20% share of U.S. SME card-based lending. We know that small businesses value payment flexibility and the opportunity to Pay Over Time when they need it. 90% of our business cardholders are eligible for a flexible line of credit, an important tool to help small businesses manage their cash flow, inventories, and more. Providing more working capital to our customers, whether on the card or through our flexible line of credit, enables us to deepen these customer relationships and capture a greater share of their wallet. Another priority is maintaining those high customer retention levels. Think of this as our stickiness. Once a customer comes into our doors, we want to give them as many opportunities as possible to stay. An important way that we're doing this is by building out our digital banking suite. Last June, leveraging our acquisition of Kabbage, we began rolling out our line of credit product, an important offering for small businesses, like I just mentioned. In October, we launched the American Express business checking account. This fully digital solution has no monthly maintenance fee, an attractive APY, and it connects with existing American Express products. Later this year, customers will be able to earn Membership Rewards points and redeem them for deposits in their checking account. This is just the beginning. Over the next 18 months, again, leveraging the platform and team we acquired with Kabbage, we plan to build out a multi-product digital ecosystem that will integrate our broader product set. From funding and business checking to cash flow insights, card accounts, and more, small business customers will have one easy-to-use digital banking platform to manage all their cash flow needs. This ecosystem can help drive more growth from our existing customers and help us maintain those highly desirable retention rates. Our final priority involves regaining momentum in international SME, and we have a number of efforts underway. We refreshed our Business Gold Card in the U.K., Canada, and Japan, and enhanced our Business Platinum Card in the U.K. and Canada. Like with Business Platinum in the U.S., we embedded business-focused benefits on our premium cards to meet more spending needs. Over time, we've also added payment flexibility to our cards in priority markets. We're also building on our strong network of partners with the intention to drive acquisitions and goods and services spending. Amazon is a great example of this. As a reminder, we launched two Amazon co-brand cards in the U.S. in 2018. Based on the card's success here, we expanded to the U.K. in 2020 and to Germany and France in 2021. We're seeing strong results with our new and refreshed cards driving between 25% and 40% growth, acquisition growth in key countries. Product refreshes and our continued partnership with Amazon are just two ways we plan to unlock further growth in international SME. In his introduction, Stephen set out why he's confident in the new growth aspiration. This page sets out why I'm confident that our SME business will play an important role in achieving that aspiration. We've built momentum through the crisis, and looking forward, we're taking action to secure an elevated level of growth over the longer term. We're investing to maintain elevated acquisition levels. We're capturing more goods and services spend, whether on the card or beyond the card. We're delivering more working capital to our customers, whether through a card or a line of credit. We're building to maintain our elevated retention levels, including by giving our customers a digital banking suite, and we're driving growth in international SME. Taken together, these actions play an important role in achieving the company's new growth aspiration. To close, a lot has happened since I joined American Express just three and a half years ago. The pandemic, testing all of us in ways we really couldn't have imagined. Over that time, I've seen our small business customers not just pivot, but reinvent. They reinvented how they attracted their customers. They reinvented how they sell. They reinvented how they hire their employees. For American Express Small Business, the pandemic was also a time of reinvention. We reinvented to support our customers through difficult times. We invented our card value propositions to ensure we were the best card for travel and for business. We reinvented our product ambitions, seeking to support our customers with both card and beyond the card payments in our broader digital banking suite. Now we're ready. We see a long runway for growth, and we're driving forward to capture it. We're confident there are exciting times ahead, both for our small business customers and for American Express. Thank you. I'll now hand over to my colleague, Howard Grosfield. Howard. Thank you, Anna. Good afternoon, and welcome. I'm delighted to be here today to give you an update on our consumer business, and my hope is that you'll take five key themes away from the presentation today. First, the business is exiting the pandemic in a position of great strength, and our pace of growth is accelerating. Two, our trusted brand and products are resonating in the premium space and across younger generations, and in particular millennials and Gen Zs, which we'll talk about in a few moments. Three, we're gonna show you a series of actions we took during the pandemic that have changed the shape of our business, and as a result, we emerge from the pandemic with a stronger business model and a stronger leadership position. Four, we'll talk about our differentiated strategy, our approach to innovation, and how they both unlock our ability to stay ahead of the industry and deliver accelerated growth. Finally, five, we'll illustrate why we think the premium space and younger generations are growing and how that has translated into a pipeline of attractive investments that has emerged stronger. With these five themes in mind, we've structured them into three distinct sections that, when added together, we think make a compelling case for why we are so confident we can accelerate our growth trajectory going forward. Let's jump into section one and talk about why we think we've emerged from the pandemic with a stronger business model and a stronger leadership position. As you can see from the middle section of this slide, which compares our growth to 2019, the business has not only recovered to pre-pandemic levels, the pace of our growth in each quarter from Q1 to Q4 is accelerating, and most importantly, the exiting quarter is accelerating across all three metrics. It's also worth pointing out on the left side of the slide that we entered the pandemic with great strength and momentum. You may recall that consumer had nine quarters of double-digit revenue growth and accelerated share gains in lending. The story we're gonna share today is really a story of strength to strength. If you take a closer look at the B2B business line and we unpack how our spending recovered, you can see that our recovery has been powered by three things. Goods and services spend on the left, the U.S. business in the middle, and younger generations on the right, but most notably millennials and Gen Zs who spend, as you can see in the bottom right, exited Q4 at 50% higher levels than 2019. As a result, we should benefit from tailwinds as T&E, international, and older generations continue to accelerate and recover. Our spend-centric model has also been driving accelerated lending growth, as it did before the pandemic. More recent investments in lending capabilities have only strengthened our ability to capitalize on and accelerate our future lending growth. Starting with the chart on the left, which shows total global consumer card member loan volumes by quarter, you will see that we've not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels at $70.5 billion, but the pace of growth began to accelerate in Q2, and in Q4, we added one of the highest increases in volumes in a single quarter. What might be more interesting are the graphs on the right. Starting with the graph in the middle, we now ship all Centurion line charge products with embedded lending and Plan It functionality. As a result, we are acquiring an entirely new generation of customers who will never know that our Centurion line of products were once pay in full only. Their day one understanding of the product includes lending and Plan It as embedded features alongside our more widely known no preset spending limits that still enable higher spending. In addition, we no longer have to market to card members to enroll in these very important lending features. As an example of the impact of this change can be seen in the middle graph, which shows the average balance in the first three months of a new Platinum customer in the U.S. pre versus post embedding lending on our U.S. Platinum portfolio. New Platinum customers have gone from effectively zero to 81% of the early average revolving balance we see across all our lending products. Now, when you look at the graph on the right, which shows total AR growth versus 2019 for the top five issuers, Amex, the Centurion line, as well as Platinum, it underscores how this investment is changing the shape of our business model and strengthening our ability to gain share of lendable wallet, particularly among our Centurion line of charge customers. This last point only becomes more compelling if acquisitions of our Centurion line of products continue to accelerate, which is exactly what we're gonna talk about on the next slide. As this slide shows, premium acquisition performance is very strong, and it is being powered by our fee-based proprietary products, most notably Platinum and Gold. Starting with the graph on the left, which shows quarterly average new account volume on the solid line and billings acquired on the bars, you can see that we're bringing in fewer cards than we did pre-pandemic, but dramatically higher billings acquired at 1.4 times the size that it was in 2019. This change in the shape of our acquisition engine is explained by the table below. In rows one and two, you can see that we are attracting a significantly higher average spending prospect, up by 1.5 times versus 2019, and a greater percentage of those prospects, more than two-thirds or 67%, are willing to pay a fee. This is translated into an almost doubling of the average fee per NAA in row three, where it is increased from $77 to $141. We expect this to accelerate with the acquisition momentum you see from our fee-based products on the right side of the page. Platinum, Gold, and Blue Cash Preferred are powering our growth, and the pace of the momentum continued to accelerate throughout the year. In fact, all three products delivered some of their highest acquisition volumes on record throughout and exiting 2021. While co-brand products still have room to recover and will provide healthy tailwinds, we're making very important investments in those relationships as well. For example, we continue to invest and increase the appeal of our Delta Air Lines products to make them the most valuable co-brand cards in the industry. What is even more compelling about the dynamics of our acquisition engine is what you see on the graph on the left. We've significantly increased the millennial and Gen Z share of new accounts to 60%. As you will see later in the presentation, and Stephen touched on this, when you look at Platinum and Gold, that 60 jumps to 75%. On the right side of the page, you can see that these millennial and Gen Z customers are strong, super prime card members. They have the same willingness to pay a fee, similar lending profiles with slightly lower spend that should naturally grow over time as they age and increase their income. The question becomes how? How did we strengthen our relevance with millennials and Gen Zs? I think the evolution of our U.S. Platinum product is a great example of our playbook or our approach. As you can see from the timeline on the far left, in 2017, we refreshed the U.S. Consumer Platinum Card by introducing meaningful incremental value and pricing up for that value for the first time in more than a decade. This refresh performed exceptionally well, and it began to build momentum with millennials and Gen Zs, particularly those interested in what was still largely a travel-focused product. More recently, we made investments during the pandemic to provide value while travel was limited, like streaming credits that also resonated with younger generations. Then last July, we refreshed Platinum again and diversified the value proposition with a suite of new lifestyle benefits and experiences while also doubling down on travel and raising the fee to $695 to price for this additional value. We continue to add new benefits outside major refreshes like Walmart+ and artist design cards to maintain excitement and meet the changing needs of our card members. This is a strategy you should expect to see us continue going forward. While our success at attracting younger consumers started long before we introduced a meaningful number of lifestyle benefits, the engagement metrics on the right side of the page illustrate that our benefits are resonating and diversification has strengthened our appeal to a wider segment of millennials and Gen Zs. Now I wanna move away from prospect acquisition and shift the conversation over to our large and very important base of existing card members. The slide outlined just a sample of the many important investments we made during the pandemic to protect and strengthen our relationships with our base of existing card members. Examples like financial relief, digital servicing, value injection investments to make our products more relevant during the pandemic, the Platinum refresh, and recognition programs all strengthen those relationships during what was a very uncertain time. As you're gonna see in the next couple of pages, when we look at existing customer performance on three dimensions, their contribution to growth, their retention, and their credit metrics, these investments have unequivocally paid off. Let's start with contribution to growth. As you can see from the left side of this slide, we've scaled the investments we make in strengthening our relationships with existing customers and marketing additional services like supplementary cards for spouses and children, upgrades from Gold to Platinum, companion cards to help manage the household, line increases, personal loans, and now banking services, which we launched just a few weeks ago. As we continue to grow our premium base and the percentage of prospects that are willing to pay a fee, so does the demand for the type of customer add-on services I just listed. As you'd expect, customer investments are about 3 times more efficient than prospect. As you can see on the right side of the page, customer now makes up 45% of all revenue acquired, which is defined as a rolling projection of the revenue from marketing investments to both new and existing customers. Shifting to retention and credit metrics, our performance improved throughout the pandemic and remains strong. The left side of the slide shows our customer retention rate for U.S. Consumer. Not only has customer retention exceeded pre-pandemic levels, but U.S. customer retention, as you can see, now stands north of 98%. On the right side, we step into credit metrics and delinquency rates. Starting with the very top line, which represents the industry average without Amex, you see that rates have improved across the industry with some increases in the most recent quarter. When you step down to the very bottom line, which represents Amex-only performance, you can see that we've not only improved our performance versus pre-pandemic significantly, but we continue to deliver superior performance versus the industry with the gap currently at 155 basis points. What's even more interesting is the line in the middle, which represents the performance of Amex customers on the competitor card that is also in their wallet. This line suggests that customers are more loyal to Amex even under financial stress when, faced with limited funds, they choose to pay their balance with us ahead of our competitors, which speaks to the investments we've made in servicing as well as our financial relief program. Finally, as all of these investments that we've made over the last couple of years come together in driving our top line, you see a compelling set of revenue outcomes and insights. On the left side, revenue acquired is significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. When you unpack our revenue trajectory on the right side by looking at spend, lend, and fee revenue at the per card member level, you can see we've exceeded pre-pandemic levels off the back of very strong fee and spend growth and despite declining lend revenue, which creates yet another tailwind as lending recovers. This impressive fee and spend revenue growth are being powered by the three things we've been talking about, a higher average spending prospect, a greater percentage of those prospects willing to pay a fee, and how we've scaled the monetization of our existing card member base. You'll also notice on the right side that we have a balanced revenue mix across spend, lend, and fee revenues, which served us well during the pandemic and, as you know, stands alone in our industry. Our competitors make about 70%-80% of their revenue from lending. When we bring it all together, the actions we took during the pandemic, as you can see listed down the left side of the slide, changed the shape of our business. They changed the shape of our premium acquisition engine and accelerated our goods and services spending. They also changed the role of younger generations, the contribution to growth by existing customers, lending momentum across products and charge in particular, as well as the role partnerships play as a core part of our product value propositions, which we discussed in the Platinum example and I will revisit again in just a moment. As a result, we believe we've emerged from the pandemic with a much stronger business model and stronger leadership position. Now let's talk about our strategy and approach to innovation, which as I said on the very first slide, has served us well and delivered nine quarters of double-digit revenue growth going into the pandemic, but more importantly, helped us navigate and emerge even stronger. Our strategy has long been a member-focused strategy that places our card members and our core card business at the center. When you look at the list of membership services around the outside of card membership on the right side of the page, there's no confusion about what business we're in. We're not in the travel or dining business per se. We are in those businesses because they strengthen and differentiate our core card business that is deeply focused on the premium space. With this in mind, I'm gonna quickly highlight just a few examples of how we bring this strategy to life. Let's start by talking about innovation. While competitors can try and replicate our member-focused strategy, it is innovation combined with a singular focus on the card business that powers our differentiation. Part of it, as you can see on the left, comes from our strength in partnerships and the way we infuse partner DNA into our products and services. Part of it, as you can see in the middle, is the way we invest in new ventures that give us a front-row seat to learn or the way we place a new venture inside Amex Lab and expose the service to thousands of card members so that we can watch, learn, and ultimately let the card members decide if we should build or buy it, which is exactly what we did with Mezi. On the right side, Amex Offers is a great way for us to test whether we should hardwire a benefit like streaming services on Platinum by first introducing it as a limited time offer to see if Platinum card members like it. In addition, another great example is our ability to test new features and services in multiple countries simultaneously by leveraging our global footprint. I would say arguably the aspect of our strategy that is most difficult to replicate is the attractiveness of our card member base combined with our ability to target and reach them. This combination is unmatched in our industry. As you can see from the left side, our card members control approximately 1/3 of industry spend and have significantly higher and more premium consumption behaviors by almost any metric. This has enabled us to unlock significant funding or advertising dollars from the best brands or merchants and partner to create the powerful cycle that you see on the right side of the page. By creating advertising access to our premium card members in the form of funded offers or embedded benefits, we can attract the best brands to help us deliver more unique and differentiated value propositions that are co-funded by our world-class partners. As long as we deliver superior returns to our partners on these investments, we can retain and expand the funding levels and ultimately deliver even more differentiated value propositions that will in turn help us acquire and retain more of these premium customers. This partner-funded strategy is working. Whether partner-funded value is hardwired into our products as shown on the left side of the slide or loaded onto our Amex Offers platform that now has over 1,000 brands, it is driving significant increases in engagement on both the card member and merchant side of the business as you can see from the charts on the right. It's also worth pointing out that our card members are our greatest ambassadors, and they help us acquire new customers as well. Customer-sourced acquisition, or as we call it, Member-Get-Member, is now our second-largest consumer acquisition channel globally, and the quality of these prospects is exceptional. As you can see, it is a channel that significantly overindexes on the percentage of prospects who come from Millennial and Gen Z, the percentage of prospects that are fee-based, and their credit quality. If we move to the outer ring of our member-focused strategy, travel and lounge are great examples of how we strengthen the membership model and expand our leadership position. As I said before, we're not in the travel business per se. We're in the travel business to strengthen the core card business by delivering great service and, more importantly, delivering valuable benefits you can only unlock with card membership. Fine Hotels and Resorts is a great example of this. Platinum and Centurion card members can unlock a free upgrade, late checkout, free breakfast or spa credits at thousands of hotels around the world. The same can be said about Lounge. We lead the industry. We've expanded globally, and we brought the lounge experience to local events like sports venues and U.S. Open tennis. Our innovation and investments in travel are clearly paying off, and yet again, they underscore just how attractive our card members are. As you can see from both graphs, our travel business leads the industry in premium travel performance by a wide margin on both air and luxury hotels as we exit the pandemic. Dining is another great example or proof point. As you can see from the top half of this slide, since we acquired Resy, we've increased the number of diners on the platform by almost three times, increased the number of restaurants by close to four times, and close to tripled the number of diners who've reserved and dined at Resy restaurants. We've also started to create proprietary benefits in dining similar to Fine Hotels and Resorts that can only be unlocked by card membership, like Global Dining Access, which delivers unique dining experiences and access to tables at some of the most sought-after restaurants around the world. I think what's also interesting about bringing Resy into the American Express franchise is how these brands and their respective two-sided marketplaces make each model stronger. When we bring Resy's unique reservation and dining access to our card business and wire it into our products, as you see on the left side, it strengthens our issuing and merchant value proposition by making it easier and more rewarding for our card members to dine at Amex-accepting restaurants. On the right side of the page, when our issuing business promotes and drives card prospects to Resy to unlock exclusive only available at Resy welcome incentives, it strengthens the diner and restaurant value proposition to participate on Resy, and it helps lower Resy's customer acquisition costs. As you can see, Resy has proven to be a very efficient affiliate-like card acquisition channel, and more importantly, it is delivering applicant quality significantly higher than the portfolio average. There are countless more examples of how we innovate and bring our differentiated membership strategy to life. Whether it is entertainment access, membership banking, Plaid, or our partnership with PayPal/Venmo, we're determined to stay several steps ahead of the industry and lead in unique and compelling ways. In addition to the first two sections, we also believe the premium space is growing, and in particular, it is growing among younger generations. This premium and younger generation dynamic plays right into our strengths as the industry leader. For proof that the premium space is growing, we can start by looking at our own business for evidence. Starting on the left side of the page where we illustrate the demand for our premium products through the lens of Platinum acquisition, you will recall that other issuers made big investments in the premium space in 2016. During this very intense competitive environment, we responded by adding incremental value and pricing up for that value. As you can see, the number of Platinum accounts acquired annually from 2016 to 2019 doubled, while competitors also grew their premium portfolios. As we entered and weathered the pandemic in 2020 until about the first half of 2021, where arguably our travel propositions were rendered less relevant, we grew volumes again by another 27% off the back of some innovative investments. Finally, in July of last year, as we discussed earlier, we refreshed the product, added significant value, and priced the fee up again and have already seen a 30% increase in volumes. On the right side of the page, when you look at the size of the total installed Platinum and Gold portfolios, you can see that the number of accounts has significantly increased despite heightened competitive intensity and pricing up for the strong value we deliver not once but twice on Platinum. All of this indicates the premium pie is getting bigger. If we look to industry data, it suggests a similar conclusion. The premium fee-based space is growing three times faster than the industry average, and the younger segment is growing at 12%. These dynamics play to our unique strengths as an industry leader deeply focused on the premium space. As you can see, we estimate we are growing at more than two times the industry rate for premium accounts at 14% and gaining share. On the right side, we estimate that our share of premium accounts is approximately 20% of a space that is growing, which provides us with a long runway for growth. In addition, our strong position with Millennial and Gen Z only strengthens our runway for growth. As we pointed out earlier, Millennial and Gen Z already make up more than half of our global acquisitions and 75% of Platinum and Gold. When we acquire customers under the age of 35, on average, they deliver an additional 18 years of lifetime value opportunity. More importantly, their best earning and spending years are still ahead of them, which is why they provide a steeper growth trajectory as they age, increase their income, and expand their need for a wider set of financial and lifestyle services. Finally, one more compelling sign the premium space is expanding is what we can see right in front of us as we look at our own investments for this year. The depth and diversity of attractive growth opportunities across our business is compelling, especially in the context of a growing premium space. Whether it is premium fee-based acquisitions, monetization of existing customers, lending personal loans, new services like consumer banking, our pipeline of investment options has emerged stronger. In addition, we have a disciplined and data-driven approach to the way we evaluate, choose, and optimize what ultimately gets funded against a very high ROI bar. This year, as you can see from the chart on the right, the list of investments for us to choose from that exceeds this very high bar is up 54% versus pre-COVID levels. This will translate into improving our overall efficiency. In closing, I'd offer three takeaways. One, we've emerged from the pandemic with a much stronger business model and a stronger leadership position. Two, we have a long track record of leveraging our differentiated strategy to deliver accelerated growth long before, during, and exiting the pandemic. Finally, the premium space and younger segments are growing. As a result, we remain confident we can deliver accelerated growth trajectory. Thank you for your time. Now, I will turn it over to Raymond, who will talk about our expanding network and how it's supporting our growth. Thanks, Howard. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to speak with you about the merchant and network business and the role that we've been playing within the company's growth plan. I've been with American Express for 30 years, and over the last year had the privilege to lead the dynamic business that's enabling our consumer and commercial card members to spend at merchants and transact on the network. I wanted to start by providing you some context and sharing a few numbers that convey the depth and breadth of our business riding on the network. We have 177 issuing and acquiring partners operating in 198 countries and territories with more than 66 million merchants globally accepting American Express payment products. We have 122 million cards in force that perform 9 billion transactions per year and contribute $1.3 trillion in network volume. If American Express's network volumes were expressed as a country's gross domestic product, we'd be the 16th largest country in the world. It's also important to reinforce what makes us unique. Unlike other networks, we do more than authorize, clear, and settle transactions. We're also the major issuer of cards, as you just heard about from Anna and Howard, and a major acquirer on the network. As a result, we have fundamentally different revenue streams as well as unmatched insights into customer spending behavior. This helps power the virtuous cycle that Stephen referred to earlier. As I go through the presentation, there are two key messages I'd like you to keep in mind. First, our merchant coverage gains are driving scale, share, and relevance and have been a significant contributor to American Express's volume growth and revenue growth. Second, we believe that we can drive sustainably higher revenue growth by expanding the network globally, driving greater usage of it by deepening engagement and awareness, and leveraging our modern Agile capabilities to capture new revenue streams. With that in mind, let's move to our agenda. Today, I'm gonna focus on our coverage journey and the progress we're making to significantly grow the number of locations that accept American Express. I'll start by giving you a global view of our coverage growth and then break it down into the U.S. and international markets, and lastly, provide you an update on our investments to modernize our network. I'm pleased to share that globally, since 2017, we grew the number of locations that accept American Express by 164%. To more than 66 million locations, and that includes 17 million locations in China. Our hybrid acquiring model is the driving force behind these changes. I'll refer to this throughout the presentation, but the primary principle is that we add new merchants to our network in two ways. We acquire merchants directly, and we enable our partners to acquire on our behalf. Together, this approach gives us the best of both worlds. A direct relationship with larger merchants and a very cost-efficient way to sign smaller merchants at scale. This strategy has driven fast and strong growth in locations and enabled two important outcomes. We achieved and maintained virtual parity coverage in the U.S., meaning American Express card members can use their payment products at 99% of the card places that accept cards in the U.S., and we more than doubled our locations internationally. These coverage gains are a significant building block for the company's growth plan. Every year, new merchant signings fuel the expansion of the network, and in 2021, that translated into $60 billion of new spending. That's a significant component of in-year volume growth. We expect this trend will continue in the years ahead, driven by three main sources. New businesses open every day, and we'll focus on capturing them as they're created. Cash and check-based businesses begin accepting cards. Lastly, more card-accepting merchants begin accepting American Express. More merchants on the network give card members more places to spend, and card members around the world are noticing. This slide shows the countries where better coverage is having a positive impact on card member satisfaction, as measured by the Net Promoter Score. Card members are getting even greater lifetime value out of membership because they have more places to spend. To summarize, we've made tremendous gains in global coverage. These gains are translating into incremental volume growth and improving the card member experience. The coverage journey is far from over. There are significant growth opportunities on the road ahead. We'll focus on continuing to expand the network by efficiently acquiring new merchants and driving greater usage of it by deepening engagement and awareness of both card members and merchants. In the next section, I'll walk you through the journey so far in the U.S. and the opportunities ahead. As I mentioned earlier, we achieved virtual parity coverage in the U.S. at the end of 2019, and we're pleased to say that we maintain that coverage as confirmed by the February 2022 Nielsen report. The major ingredient of our success in the U.S. has been deploying the hybrid acquiring model. Our proprietary teams sign and maintain direct relationships with our larger, more strategic merchants. These are the ones that drive more than 70% of the volume in the U.S. Our partners help manage just over 25% of the spend volume but represent more than 80% of the locations. These are our OptBlue partners like Fiserv and FIS, as well as aggregators like Adyen, Square, and Stripe. They give us scale, turning on acceptance for millions of small merchants, small to micro merchants, while also servicing and managing these relationships on our behalf. They make accepting American Express easier for small merchants, allowing us to significantly grow in a very cost-efficient way. The result, our card members can feel confident using their card at more places than ever before, from major retailers, both online and in store, to local mom-and-pop coffee shops. Since 2017, the hybrid acquiring model helped us scale our U.S. network efficiently, growing locations by more than 40%. That growth was fueled by a conscious decision to shift the acquiring and management of smaller merchants to our partners. While we continue to directly manage our larger relationships, these partners together have accelerated our gains by adding millions of merchants to our network that we could not have achieved by ourselves. Those partner gains have supported a 23% U.S. volume growth, highlighted by the graph on the right. Looking ahead, we expect partners to continue to fuel the expansion of the network, both in the U.S. and, as I'll touch on later, around the globe. It's also important to note travel spend sits mostly on our directly managed merchants, and we expect a tailwind over the next couple of years as travel volumes continue in their recovery. In the U.S., the value of these partnerships really come to life in the goods and service spending. Through our partners, the number of goods and service businesses on our network grew by 85% in the U.S. between 2017 and 2021, which drove an 87% increase in volume. That growth has been fueled by more new merchants signed in categories like online retail, home improvement, personal and professional services, and by investments in our card member value propositions, which Howard Grosfield and Anna Marrs just highlighted earlier. Looking ahead, our runway for growth is paved by driving greater usage on the network and expanding it with the industry. That's an important distinction since in the U.S. we are at parity. We're no longer playing catch up. Let's talk about the expansion opportunities. As new businesses form and more industries adopt card payments, we'll focus on capturing them at their onset. Our hybrid acquiring model allows us to expand the U.S. network efficiently and at scale by adding newly created merchants. As we do this through our proprietary client management teams or through our partners across every industry. We're also pushing into new-to-plastic industries. These include transit and parking, important and persistent everyday spend categories that are growing in their contactless usage and capturing a large opportunity in B2B payments. The way businesses buy and sell goods to each other is complex, costly, fraught, full of friction, and ripe for innovation. More than 40% of B2B transactions in the U.S. are still paid for with paper checks. As Anna outlined earlier, the digitization of these payments has only accelerated during COVID. Our merchant and commercial teams are partnering closely to build out our integrated B2B network, which allows us to capture more spending between commercial buyers and suppliers. We're also working with key players in emerging payments as emerging payments evolve, such as in the buy now, pay later space and by signing NFT providers. Beyond the expansion of the network, the other opportunity is to drive merchant engagement and increase card member awareness. The signing of a merchant is only the beginning of the journey, as measured by these three metrics. Technical acceptance is when a merchant is set up to accept American Express payment products. If you run the card through at the point of sale, the transaction will go through. Merchant acknowledgment coverage means the merchants and their staff are fully aware and communicating to their customers that they can now accept American Express. That's where stickers on the door, signage at the registers, logos on websites become incredibly important. We're making investments in this area by distributing signage and visiting new merchants. A blue box in the logo or on the website is a powerful signal of acceptance. This helps with the third metric, card member perception of coverage, and this is how we measure card member awareness. On the right-hand side of this slide, you see how these metrics stacked up at the end of 2021. In the U.S., American Express cards can be used in 99% of locations that accept credit cards, while 88% of those merchants are both aware and communicating that acceptance to their customers. That said, given the rapid growth in our merchant base, our card members' perceptions of coverage is still catching up. We're proud of the coverage gains, and we're making good progress against these metrics. Improving these metrics offers significant opportunities to fuel further growth on our existing network in the U.S. By strengthening merchant acknowledged coverage and card member perceptions of coverage, we translate technical acceptance gains into incremental spend and revenue. How are we driving merchant engagement? A good example is merchant membership. Our merchants already have access to our high-spending loyal card members and benefit from the lowest fraud rates in the payment industry. The concept of membership is part of our brand ethos and a significant differentiator for the company. Through merchant membership, we're making accepting American Express even more valuable, and more businesses are warmly welcoming our cards in-store and online. Merchants have a full access to a full suite of benefits, insights, and services to help them run and grow their business. From merchant discounts and savings to financing and payment solutions, and programs like Amex Offers that connects card members and merchants in helping merchants find new customers to grow their business. As Howard highlighted earlier, merchant-funded value from American Express and Amex Offers is a core component of our value propositions. We'll continue to work together to make membership even more valuable for both card members and merchants. We'll also focus on scaling marketing and industry-specific programs in partnership with the consumer and the commercial teams. These programs were especially important during the pandemic to help support merchants through their recovery. We encourage card members to spend with local businesses through marketing programs like Shop Small and Small Business Saturday, as Anna mentioned earlier, as well as offered grant programs for historic and long-standing small restaurants. In turn, the presence and impact of these programs encourage small business owners to warmly welcome American Express payment products in their stores, giving card members increasing confidence to use their Amex products in more places. In summary, we've achieved virtual parity in the U.S. We have growth opportunities to get more out of our existing network while also expanding it within the industry. Now let's look a little more closely across international. Outside the U.S., we're at a different stage in that journey. At the end of 2017, we launched our international coverage strategy. We have a targeted approach to add coverage where it matters most for our card members and maintain premium economics. As a result, we've more than doubled the number of locations that accept American Express, and this excludes China. Our increase in international merchant locations is driven by signing marquee merchants, large brand names where card members want to spend, focusing on key industry verticals as well as priority international cities, and expanding our partner-driven coverage approach. We're making significant progress in driving coverage where it matters most for our card members. On the left is a small sampling of new merchant signings across multiple markets. These are top brand names requested by our card members from major retail stores to key online players, from pharmacies to government agencies. Because card members shop at these places often, there's a halo effect to improve overall perceptions of coverage. We're also making strong progress in key verticals, including major e-commerce websites, where spending has increased dramatically since the onset of the pandemic. We've made tremendous gains in signing top tourist attractions over the last few years, and I'll speak more about the travel opportunity in a moment. We're gaining efficient scale by building strong relationships with partners who can acquire on our behalf, as we do in the U.S. We have numerous partnerships with international banks and acquirers who are expanding their geographic footprint, and therefore American Express acceptance. In fact, we launched more than a dozen of these acquiring partnerships in just the last year alone. We are deepening our global relationships with aggregators like Square, Stripe, Adyen, as they expand into new markets. We expanded OptBlue, our small merchant partner acquiring program, to Australia, Canada, Mexico, and India. The results of the strategy, the investments, and the team's efforts are paying dividends at both the country and the city level. As you can see here, we show 6 of the 48 priority cities across three European countries. We saw double-digit gains in the total number of merchants saying yes to American Express and continued improvement in merchant satisfaction over the same period. Merchants are realizing the benefits and value of accepting American Express, recognizing why welcoming our cards is good for their business. While we're pleased with the progress, we have a significant runway of opportunity and are pushing on the two big levers I highlighted earlier, the expansion of the network and obtaining greater usage of it. Given where we are on the coverage journey, the biggest international opportunity comes from expanding our network of merchants using our hybrid acquiring model in priority cities, key countries, and across select verticals. As we expand, we'll also drive greater engagement and card member awareness. Let me touch on each of these. Across international, we have two core objectives: achieve more than 75% coverage across 48 priority cities and key countries, and ensure strong acceptance across key industry verticals. We'll use the learnings of the past few years to accelerate our progress using American Express colleagues and partner teams to help us win. We'll seek to sign larger marquee merchants to help drive usage and perceptions of coverage, while also using our existing and additional acquiring partners to drive scale and relevance efficiently. With our strategy, objectives, and key levers in place, we're confident that by 2024, we can double the number of priority cities with greater than 75% acceptance of American Express cards. Let me explain this chart. The dark blue on the left represents 17 of the cities where we already have 75% plus coverage. We'll continue to expand here and drive increased engagement. By 2024, we're focused on moving 17 more cities above the 75% threshold. These are represented in light blue with the red box around it. The next set of cities represented in gray will take a little longer, but we're continuing to advance our coverage efforts. Additionally, in these priority cities, we'll look to achieve 100% coverage in these key verticals to improve the card member experience, giving card members more freedom to use their cards where they live, work, and travel to most. In particular, we're focused on driving even stronger coverage in important everyday spend categories like e-commerce and transportation, as well as in travel verticals like airlines and tourist attractions. We're making these investments now for the long-term benefit of the network. Cross-border travel will return, and as it does, our network will be more vibrant and will capture incremental revenues. Like in the U.S., once we sign a merchant, there's still a large opportunity to drive greater usage. I showed you the merchant growth in these cities a few minutes ago. We still have an opportunity to deepen the relationship with these merchants. To improve our merchant acceptance coverage, we'll make sure that merchants are aware they can now accept our card and encourage them to promote acceptance to customers. We plan to do this by developing bold acceptance messages to ensure card members are aware of our progress, both online and in stores. Improving merchant value so that businesses see the unique benefits and prefer American Express transactions, all supported by the expansion of our marketing programs like Shop Small and Amex Offers that bring card members and merchants together. The end result, card members feeling increasingly confident using their American Express card for every purchase. Lastly, I wanna highlight how our network modernization efforts are positioning American Express to capture broader revenue streams. At the core of our integrated payments platform is a sophisticated technical infrastructure that supports all our key partners globally. It authorizes, clears, and settles all of their transactions. Then over the last few years, we've invested in modernizing and upgrading our network's infrastructure. These investments are making the network more simple, more seamless, and more secure for our merchants, acquirers, issuers, and bank partners. They allow us to deploy products, services, and capabilities with greater speed and agility, be faster to innovate in new and emerging payment spaces like mobile wallets and QR codes, have greater flexibility to build once for many, building a capability and more easily deploying it to many countries at the same time, and to develop and support emerging payments. Our newly modernized network has opened up some exciting opportunities. It enables us to be the first foreign network in China, where in just over two years, we've added 17 million traditional point-of-sale merchants and 80 million QR-accepting locations. While credit and charge remain our core business, debit capabilities open the door and are offering new product lines and transactions to ride on the network. In just the last few months, we launched two new checking accounts with debit for both consumer and commercial customers. By modernizing our capabilities, we'll continue to develop and deploy new technologies that enable safer, more secure transactions as the payment landscape evolves. This includes emerging payments like contactless QR codes and digital wallets, as well as new innovations like SoftPOS, where any phone can be used as a payment terminal. We're seeing growing interest in usage in these areas, and we're engaging and capturing those transactions as they take off. The future ahead is exciting for us, and our coverage gains are driving scale, share, and relevance, which is accelerating discount revenue growth. We're confident that we'll continue by expanding our network around the world, driving greater usage of it, and leveraging our modern and agile network to open up broader revenue streams for us. Thank you. We're now gonna take a We will now return at 2:55 and hear from our colleague, Anré Williams. Thank you. Hello, everyone. How are you? I'm Anré Williams, and as Stephen said at the beginning, I'm here to talk to you about technology and customer servicing capabilities and how they're driving growth for the company efficiently. In my remarks today, I'll focus on answering three questions. What gives us confidence that our technology capabilities can help deliver on our growth aspirations? Why do we have an industry-leading reputation for customer service, and how do we maintain it? How do our technology and customer servicing capabilities deliver operating efficiencies? I'll conclude by briefly discussing some of the key opportunities we see ahead to continue our progress on both the technology and customer servicing fronts. Our vision is to leverage technology and our world-class servicing capabilities to drive the following. Growth through strong customer acquisition, engagement, and retention, best-in-class customer experiences and efficiencies in operating expense leverage. We have over 41,000 colleagues around the world delivering our technology, our digital, and our servicing capabilities, all of whom are united in their focus and determination to make this vision a reality. To show how we go about bringing our vision to life, I'll begin with a discussion about how our approach to technology drives growth and efficiency. It starts with our tech philosophy, which is focused on delivering the following outcomes: increased scale and efficiency, improved speed to market, high quality, all with the focus on keeping the customer at the center of all we do. For example, we deploy global platforms and align them with our hybrid cloud strategy, which utilizes both our internal private cloud and our external public cloud providers to optimize our computing footprint. This enables us to scale rapidly and deliver new products, services, and features for our customers across geographies and business segments quickly and efficiently. To help drive speed to market, we decided way back in 2013 to invest in building a powerful internal engineering capability with development teams who use both Agile and DevOps methodologies. These methodologies enable our engineers to iterate quickly to meet evolving customer needs with less rework and with a more efficient use of our development spending. To help ensure quality, we have an integrated automated test environment for our critical platforms, which enables us to continuously test and deploy new software while eliminating the need to align testing timelines across hundreds of teams and perform manual quality assurance activities. Underpinning all the products and services and capabilities we create is deep appreciation and understanding of what our customers need and expect. Our overall philosophy informs the way we design and architect our technology. We design our systems to provide a single view of the customer, recognizing that many of our customer relationships involve interactions across multiple products, markets, and channels. We create connected and seamless omni-channel experiences for our customers, delivering consistency no matter how they choose to transact and engage with us across all channels and a range of devices. We emphasize cloud-native technology built in containers, which can run in our private cloud, but can also be easily migrated to the public cloud without having to be rebuilt, which saves us time, effort, and cost. We employ secure modular architecture that is deployed globally. This approach helps drive consistency on a global scale while also allowing for customization that ensures our products feel local and relevant in every corner of the world. Finally, we enable flexible and open partner integration through APIs, so customers can experience the same innovative capabilities and features they associate with American Express when they interact with our partners. A great recent example of this is the integration of our Plan It buy now, pay later capability with Delta Air Lines. With our philosophy as a guide and our architecture principles, we continuously invest in technology modernization. We've done this through a thoughtful, intentional, multi-year investment strategy, which has allowed us to uplift our technology on an ongoing basis over time while avoiding large one-time expenditures. Now, here are a few examples of how this approach has worked. Uplifting our merchant settlement capabilities has been a multi-year initiative, which has enabled us to pay merchants around the globe more quickly and with more flexibility. This has significantly increased merchant satisfaction, especially among the smaller merchants, which is a key factor that's enabled us to achieve our coverage goals. The modernization of our payments network through the use of cloud technology has enabled us to deliver twice as much computing capacity to our network for the same cost. Importantly, as Raymond spoke about earlier, this modernization effort has enabled us to build and launch a local network in China, but has also enabled us for the very first time to authorize and process debit transactions globally, as well as integrate ACH transactions and new payment methods such as QR codes. Continuous investment in our servicing capabilities is driving an integrated global ecosystem that is allowing us to provide customers with even more efficient and personalized interactions. With our ongoing digital platforms work, we are applying a unified API and web framework to enable scalable global deployment of digital experiences that are seamless across platforms, devices, and geographies. The technology capabilities we've built and modernized over the last several years have enabled global scale, which is enabling profitable growth. Today, our tech capabilities give us the ability to develop and refresh products and integrate new features much faster and more cost-effective than just a few years ago. As a result, our business partners are able to launch significantly more new and refreshed products and services last year than in the past. Through the development and global implementation of our digital marketing capabilities, 80% of new accounts acquired last year came through digital channels. Last year, 85% of our proprietary card members globally used our website or our mobile, and/or our mobile app. On average, we processed 27.8 million proprietary transactions through our authorization systems daily. With consistent upgrades to our authorization system over the years, we've been able to more seamlessly connect digital partners. An example of this is Apple Pay, which we've implemented now in 23 countries. Our authorization platform, combined with our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, has enabled us to create a state-of-the-art fraud detection system that has produced best-in-industry fraud loss rates. Now of course, a key focus of our technology investments is to deliver digital innovations that enhance our value propositions, increase acquisition efficiency, and drive customer satisfaction. We do this through our internal engineering teams, but also by working with partners from digital giants to fintechs. Some examples include our Member-Get-Member acquisition capability, which has become an important viral acquisition channel, as Howard mentioned earlier. The rewards checking account and debit card that we launched last month for U.S. consumer card members was developed to create a unique offering that integrates American Express card benefits, like Membership Rewards and purchase protection with a fully digital checking account. We rolled out the Amazon Business American Express Card in the U.S. in three international countries, and Anna mentioned that a bit ago. In the U.S., we reduced the decisioning time for new account applications by approximately 50%. Our digital fraud alert capability leverages the data we have on our payments network, along with our AI machine learning capabilities to drive real-time texts to our card members and allows them to either accept or deny the charges immediately, providing greater peace of mind. Now in addition to driving growth, we leverage our technology capabilities to enhance customers' experiences with our products and services. A recent example is the work we've been doing to introduce self-servicing capabilities for travel, our American Express Travel, through our mobile web experience. It's widely known that American Express operates a large consumer travel agency. What is less well-known is that the vast majority of our travel bookings, in fact 83% in 2021, are done digitally. As the chart shows, this figure has grown significantly over the last five years as we've invested in upgrading and expanding our digital capabilities in travel. Since 2017, we've introduced 23 new digital travel capabilities, enabling our customer to self-service and avoid calling us or their travel providers directly. For example, customers can now change or cancel flight and car reservations and get refunds right through our mobile web experience quickly and securely. This has been a major plus for us during the pandemic, helping to offload call volume to our travel counselors as travel plans have been disrupted by changing personal plans and evolving restrictions at destinations around the world. Creating global technology platforms at scale enables us to deliver cost efficiencies for the company that give us sustainable operating expense leverage. Now we look at technology expenses in two broad categories. Tech ops expenses, which we refer to as running the business costs. This includes upgrading and maintaining our tech infrastructure, such as our authorization platform or our merchant network infrastructure or our cybersecurity and so on. The second broad category is tech investment expenses, which encompasses our development spending for new capabilities and new products and services. This slide looks at our technology operations spending since 2017 on an absolute basis and as a percentage of our revenues. What the bars show is that our annual operations expenses have remained relatively flat over the past 5 years. At the same time, the number of transactions processed have grown over this time period. As a result, our tech operations expenses have remained below 4% of revenues since 2017, and we expect that this trend will continue. The next slide shows our tech investment spending since 2017. As you can see, our technology investment spending has remained within a relatively stable range for the past several years, during which time we have continuously been innovating and improving our capabilities and bringing a growing number of new digital-first products and services to the market. As a result of these two slides, they show that we can create operating expense leverage for the company on a sustainable basis, while also ensuring that our technology capabilities remain up to date in delivering results that can help drive long-term growth. We are confident that we can continue to deliver results like these without requiring a step function increase in investments. Now that was a brief run-through of how we believe our tech capabilities will help us achieve our growth aspirations. Now let me turn to customer service. As Stephen mentioned earlier, service excellence is a core element of our brand promise and an important differentiating characteristic of our business model. It's an asset that has been built and strengthened over decades of delivering on our deep commitment to back our customers through all kinds of circumstances. Our digital first, our customer service philosophy is guided by the following principles. Digital first. We take a digital first approach in developing servicing capabilities to enable customers to self-serve for a variety of tasks quickly and easily, but according to their preferences. We've created a globally integrated, flexible servicing network that enables us to deliver seamless service around the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most important, we approach every customer interaction with a premium servicing mindset, both in everyday transactions, but also in the matter, in the moments that matter most. By building our servicing strategy around this philosophy, we've been able to continue to strengthen our reputation for service excellence while driving growth and delivering efficiencies. I'll talk about how we'll do that next. In executing against our customer first philosophy, we've created an omni-channel spectrum of servicing options which include web, mobile, chat, phone, and voice response. We've had these channels for a number of years now, but we continue to enhance and expand their capabilities, and we're seeing increasingly digital engagement from our customers as a result. An important point is that these capabilities are connected through an integrated servicing platform that enables us to serve our customers better by giving a single view of their servicing needs. While a growing amount of our servicing volume is coming through digital channels, the call volume that remains is more complex, more sensitive, and it demands high skill. This is where the human capital comes in. That's our 32,000 frontline customer care professionals and travel counselors in 29 locations around the world who provide that special sauce, which truly differentiates our customer service from the rest. In addition to driving customer satisfaction, our servicing network generates revenues. Our customer care professionals, or we refer to them as our CCPs, talk to customers all day, every day, and their expert handling of customer inquiries builds trust. And it's because of that trust, and aided by our intelligent systems that serve up recommendations which are individually suited for our card members, that we found that during these calls, our CCPs are very effective at executing appropriate customer treatments that produce revenues, such as adding supplemental cards for a customer's family members or employees, or upgrading customers to a product that better meets their needs, and increasing credit lines where warranted. Last year, for example, our CCP successfully executed 1.4 million treatments globally. Our servicing capabilities across channels are recognized for excellence by our customers. Last year, we won the trifecta of J.D. Power Awards, coming in number one in their U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction Study for the 11th time in its 15-year history, and number one for both our mobile app and our website experiences. Our superior servicing, which combines the best of both high tech and high touch, also enhances customers' experiences with American Express, which is a key driver of retention. For many years, we've measured customer satisfaction using a method called Recommend to a Friend or RTF, where we ask customers at the end of an interaction with one of our frontline service professionals if they would recommend American Express to a friend. Early on in the COVID pandemic, we faced the challenge of handling a spike in calls as customers reached out to us for help. Thanks to our integrated servicing model, we were able to shift thousands of our colleagues to the areas which had the highest needs at the time, whether that was consumer travel or credit servicing. We did it all while our 32,000 service professionals were working remotely from home. The service we provided through the course of the pandemic results in global Recommend to a Friend scores that were higher in 2020 than they were before the pandemic, and they continued to increase again in 2021. We believe these results, coupled with the successful implementation of the financial relief programs that both Anna and Howard referred to earlier, have contributed to a very high customer retention rates that we've seen through the same, very same period. Customer adoption of digital servicing channels is very cost-effective. This slide shows the growth that we've seen in U.S. self-servicing rates on an index basis back to 2018 as the use of digital servicing capabilities increased through the pandemic. Now, what's key to note here is that these increases are coming from all age cohorts, from digital native Gen Z-ers all the way through to baby boomers. This slide shows the accompanying decrease in the average number of calls per card member over the same time period. Now, while we still handle millions of calls every day, or should I say a year, not every day, but that number is decreasing significantly as digital adoption grows. We expect these trends to continue. As they do, they will drive increasing efficiencies in our overall servicing activities. Now, with the dynamic that we saw in the last slide, we've been able to drive significant operating expense leverage for the company. From 2017 to 2021, servicing expenses decreased slightly while the company's revenues increased, driving our servicing expense-to-revenue ratio to its lowest levels in 2021. Going forward, we expect to continue producing operating expense leverage for the company through the prudent management of our servicing costs. Looking ahead, we will apply our technology, philosophy, and architecture principles as we continue our modernization efforts to drive competitive advantage. The next steps in our journey include moving big data to the cloud, which will enable us to unlock even more insights and value from our data through access to cutting-edge tools and technologies, uplifting partner integration through greater use of secure and scalable APIs, which will make integration with our systems even easier for our partners, and continued modernization of our authorizations platform, which will improve time to market for new risk models and provide more opportunities to introduce enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. In customer service, we look to maintain our industry-leading servicing outcomes by increasing digital interactions and making further enhancements to our globally integrated omni-channel servicing platform. We will continue to elevate humanity and servicing, particularly in the moments that matter. We will continue to build out digital capabilities to extend our competitive advantage in travel. We will continue to drive operating leverage through our scale, ongoing digital adoption, and increased automation. I hope this all gives you a better understanding of how our technology, our digital capabilities, our servicing capabilities have contributed to the company's momentum over the past year, and why, by continuing to execute on our tech and servicing philosophies, we believe we can help the company achieve its long-term growth aspirations. If you've heard nothing else over the last 19 minutes, I'd like you to take away 3 things. We have a global scaled and flexible technology stack that, through ongoing investments, will continue to enable innovation, best-in-class customer experiences, and partnership in a cost-effective way. The industry-leading service we provide our premium customer base around the world will continue to give us a competitive advantage and lead to higher customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Together, technology and servicing will continue to drive growth, enhance customer experiences, and deliver efficiencies for the company. Thank you. Now I'll turn it over to our CFO, Jeff Campbell. Well, thank you, Anré, and good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see people in our auditorium. I suppose I should thank both people watching in real-time, the live stream, and those of you who are here for choosing us over Chairman Powell and the Fed and his 2 pm ET o'clock press conference, which I'm sure you've all looked at on your phone while you're listening. My role today is to try to take everything you've heard over the last few hours and explain how it builds up financially to the growth plan. Before I get to that, though, I thought I would start by putting this slide up, which Stephen started with. These questions are very much what we think all of you have had on your minds since we first talked about the growth plan in January. I hope at this point of the day you feel that you have a better understanding of how we feel about the answers to all of these questions. I do wanna take just a minute on the first question. Why are we confident in the growth aspirations? Stephen talked about the intersection of our strategy with the momentum we built during the pandemic with structural shifts. I would start by reminding you that pre-pandemic, we had 10 consecutive quarters of putting up revenue growth in excess of 10%. We did that while producing double-digit EPS growth, and we did it while maintaining our industry-leading return on equity in excess of 30%. We had a lot of momentum based on our strategies going into the pandemic. You've heard a lot over the last few hours about the way we executed during the pandemic based on the strategies and also based on all the work we did in 2018 and 2019 that we called Winning Through the Cycle, which really prepared our entire leadership team to think about how to optimize in a turbulent period and in a downturn. I would point out, we've talked about almost everything on this slide. We did maintain those best-in-class credit metrics, and I would point out we have a business model that in difficult times, like we've been in the last two years, produces well above target levels of capital and liquidity, which then gave us the financial flexibility to invest to build the kind of momentum that we talked about on that January earnings call. 31% year-over-year revenue growth. The best quarter ever for bringing new people into the Platinum franchise in the U.S. on both the consumer and small business side. You take the strategies, you take this kind of momentum, you add the structural shifts that we've talked about, which further play to our business model, and hopefully, that helps you understand why, as we as a management team talked about our plans for 2022 and beyond, we really reached the conclusion it was the right thing to do to reach for much higher growth aspirations in the long term than what we were producing pre-pandemic. That led to the growth plan. Long-term growth aspirations of revenue growth in excess of 10% with mid-teen EPS growth. In 2022 and 2023, results that are even above that, fueled by the pandemic recovery tailwinds. We gave you very specific guidance for 2022, 18%-20% revenue growth, earnings per share between $9.25 and $9.65. We pointed out in 2023, you'll also see revenue growth above that long-term aspirational level. That's the growth plan and where it came from. Let me now walk you through the building blocks financially and, of course, I need to start with revenue. At its core, we have a spending-based business model, right? Over 60% of our revenues as a consolidated company come from spend. At the core of that spending is spending on goods and services. In 2021, over 80% of the spending on the network was on goods and services. The growth that we've seen in that goods and services spending is powered by both consumers and by small businesses, and by all the actions that Anna and Howard have talked about over the last few hours, things we have evolved in terms of value prop, marketing efforts, technology, et cetera. The growth is also powered by the structural shifts, particularly the digitization of payment flows and the growth in e-commerce. I would say part of our confidence comes from the fact that when you think about the continued, really strong growth we've seen in online spending on goods and services, that has maintained itself even as growth in the offline world has come back. To us, that is a strong indicator of the sustainability of the trends we've seen the last two years. You put it together and pre-pandemic, spending on goods and services on our network was growing at about 7%. In aggregate, over the course of the pandemic, that growth accelerated to 11% on a compound annual growth rate. As we think about the long term, we are absolutely focused on driving goods and services spending at rates above that pre-pandemic level, fueled by all the changes that we spent the last few hours talking about. Now, travel and entertainment spending is still important. It's a more modest part of our overall spending now. Look, it's an important foundation for the company, and it remains a very important strength for our company. We continue to be very confident that travel and entertainment spend will fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. Now, in the fourth quarter, in total, we were at about 80% of pre-pandemic levels, but it really varied by industry, right? Even in the fourth quarter, restaurant spend was already above where it was pre-pandemic at 110%. My old industry, airlines, were lagging down at 57%. Although, you know, many of you have heard me say, an old airline CFO, I was the CFO at American Airlines post 9/11, airline travel will come back, right? No one thought airline travel would come back after 9/11, and you saw the biggest boom in air travel ever instead in the years after. T&E will recover at varying paces, not just by industry, but also by customer type and by geography, right? The U.S. consumer, back to Q4, it's already back above where it was pre-pandemic. That's one of the things that gives us confidence that other sectors will also eventually recover. By the end of this year, I'd expect on a global basis, both consumer and small business to be back above pre-pandemic levels, though the U.S. will lead there and the non-U.S. markets will lag a little bit. Certainly, the last group to recover will be the large and global corporations. Even that group, we fully expect to recover. Now, I will say we haven't talked much about that part of our business today, partly because it's an important foundation for the company and wasn't a particular driver of growth pre-pandemic. We don't necessarily see it as a particular driver of growth post-pandemic, but it is important, and we're quite confident it will come back. If you put those spending trends together, it leads you to a view that when you think about discount revenue, it's growing at about 7% pre-pandemic. We're very focused on driving that growth rate above that in the long term because we believe we can drive goods and services spending at rates faster than we were seeing pre-pandemic. In 2022 and 2023, of course, the growth rate will be much higher than that as travel recovers. I'd point out to you that in Q4, the growth rate was 36% year-over-year. That's discount revenue. Now, pre-pandemic, the highest growth line in our income statement was net card fee revenues, right? It was growing in the mid-teens, 15% pre-pandemic. Of course, these revenues continued to grow double digits right through the pandemic. In fact, in 2021, net card fees were 28% higher than they were in 2019. Given everything you've already heard, I hope it's pretty easy to convince this group that we expect that to accelerate. That 10% rate you see in 2021, I expect that to accelerate as we go through 2022. Our focus here in the long term is absolutely maintaining and beating that mid-teens growth rate that we were at pre-pandemic. Now, many of you do realize, but I think it's worth emphasizing, that when we talk about that growth in net card fees, it's mostly driven by bringing new customers onto fee-paying products, as well as moving existing customers from lower fee-paying products to products with more value that have higher fees. In fact, if you look at the time period from 2019 to 2021, that's what drove 71% of the increase in net card fees. The fact that we do step up fees as we add value to the cards is a more modest contributor to that growth in net card fees. Behind net card fees, the fastest-growing line in our income statement pre-pandemic was net interest income. That's because, as you all hopefully remember, for many years pre-pandemic, we grew lending a little faster than the industry. We did that by growing our lending to our existing customer base, mainly. 60% of the growth came from existing customers. We were able to do that, and we think we have a long runway to continue to do it, because of the facts both Howard and Anna touched on, which is our share of our own customers' borrowing behaviors is much lower than our share of our own customers' spending behaviors. We have many years, we believe, to grow a little faster than the industry. Now, the exact rate of that growth is gonna be determined by broader market factors. If you look at our loan balances, they have, in the last few quarters, started to grow more quickly, and certainly in 2022, those loan balances will be above pre-pandemic levels. On the right-hand side of this chart, we show you the revolving portion of those loan balances, and that is growing more slowly. We hit an inflection point in 2021, but certainly growth in those revolving balances will lag spending behaviors. We firmly believe that there has been no permanent change in the borrowing behaviors of our customers. Before we talk about what all that means for net interest income, let me talk for a second about funding. The left-hand side of this chart points out to you that we enter 2022 with far lower interest costs than we had pre-pandemic. That's a function of two things, right? Of course, the entire industry is seeing lower interest rates. The other thing happening with us is illustrated on the right-hand side of the chart. That is you've had quite a material change in our funding stack versus what we saw in 2019, with deposits now representing two-thirds of our overall funding stack. Of course, particularly in a rising rate environment, I think Powell talked about another 6 increases this year earlier today, earlier this afternoon. Particularly in a rising rate environment, deposits are generally our lowest cost source of financing. Now, to be clear, because of our charge card-based model, we are still fairly uniquely a liability sensitive company. I'm sure you all study every page of our 10-K, so you know in our 10-K that it says that if you overnight had a 100 basis point rise in interest rates over the course of the ensuing 12 months, it would cost us around $200 million in isolation. But that is in isolation. When you think about rising rates, particularly in the current environment, I'd suggest two things go with those rising rates. One, a generally pretty strong economy, which is pretty darn good for our business. Two, an inflationary environment right now. I would point out to you that when you think about our spend-centric business model, the majority of our revenues just naturally inflate with inflation, but only a minority of our costs go up with inflation. Inflation is generally a positive for our business model unless, and until you get to such high interest rates that you start to see consumers and businesses having credit challenges. I would suggest we're a long way from that in the current environment. You put the funding together with what we expect to have happen on the loan side and net interest income in 2022 on an absolute dollar basis, I expect to be back well above 2019 levels. That's fueled this year in 2022, mainly by the interest expense savings. Then I'd expect revolving balances to rebuild over time. I do expect, though, us to grow lending, as I said earlier, a little faster than the industry. I do expect in the long run, us to grow it to above, on the net interest, net interest income line, that pre-pandemic level of 13%. Before we leave revenues, I'm going to touch on one other line that generally I never bothered to talk about, and that's the miscellaneous other fees, commissions, and revenues that we have. I generally don't talk much about these lines because they really weren't a driver of growth, in any way pre-pandemic. However, I don't in the long term expect them to be a big driver of growth either. They were growing 3%-4% pre-pandemic. Many of these lines are actually travel-related revenues and/or things that have to do with cross-border flows and/or fees and other, revenue lines that have to do with business travel. For 2022 and 2023 on a percentage basis, I actually expect pretty high growth rates in these lines. These would be another in what I would call, what we've taken to calling today, our pandemic recovery tailwinds. That's the revenue story, right? Really good performance pre-pandemic, in excess of 8%, 10 straight quarters. Higher growth aspirations now as we think about the long term, in excess of 10%. Let's talk about what drives that revenue growth. I think here it might be helpful to start by throwing another slide up again that Stephen showed, because I think this virtuous cycle is really important, right? We've now talked a lot about the various investments that we have been and will continue to make on the left-hand side of this slide, brand, customer value props, et cetera. It's all of those investments that create the differentiated membership value that we have, and it's that differentiated membership value that creates the uniquely strong and engaged and growing customer base. That's what uniquely attracts an engaged and growing network of merchants and partners who then help us fund that differentiated membership value and model. What does that mean when you think about our income statement? Well, the value prop is really at the heart of that differentiated membership value and model. Many, though not all, but many of the costs associated with our differentiated value propositions fall into the lines on the P&L that we collectively refer to as our variable customer engagement costs. We were pretty clear back in January on our earnings call that in 2019, those costs collectively were 37% of revenues. We told you that in 2022, we expect them to be 42%. Now, a little of that increase is the fact that net interest income is a smaller portion of our revenue. The majority of the increase is the fact that we have concluded that by investing in all of the things you've heard about today, the brand, the value props, the technology, et cetera, we can drive higher levels of revenue growth. Our focus is on driving the highest possible levels of revenue growth and the highest possible levels of EPS growth, not on managing that 42% to any particular outcome. When you think about that number beyond 2022, we'll just have to see because our focus is doing whatever we think given the environment is the best thing to do to drive the highest level of revenue growth and the best level of profitability. It's because that differentiated value prop and differentiated membership value is so important to driving the great results we have shown most recently on acquiring new customers, on engaging our existing customers, and on driving record levels of customer retention. It's only by continuing that level of customer engagement and growth that we can continue to attract more merchant value and more partner value and stay ahead of the competition. Those merchants and partners provide value through our offer network as well as directly into our value propositions. The faster we can drive revenue growth and the higher we can get revenue growth, the better the platform we have to then get leverage on our marketing line and on the operating expense line. Let's first talk about the marketing line. Hopefully many of you have heard either me or Doug or Anna or Stephen over the years talk about our highly disciplined and analytical approach to deploying our marketing dollars. Our integrated model gives us a treasure trove of data which, combined with all the technology and analytics that Anré talked about, lets us in incredibly real time constantly move marketing dollars between channels, between products, between geographies, all based on an ever-evolving view of the lifetime value of different types of card members, exactly what kind of marketing investment is necessary to bring customers in. It is a machine that works better the more scale we have and the more opportunities we have. That's what has allowed us, if you think about our results in the run into the pandemic, to get marketing efficiencies every year and to grow that marketing line at rates below where we're growing revenues. We've given you very specific guidance for 2022. We expect to spend about $5 billion on the marketing line. Beyond that though, you should expect to see the marketing line steadily grow at rates well below where revenue is growing, and that is a key source of leverage for us as you think about getting to our bottom line goals. Now, the other source of leverage is hopefully something you feel like you've heard us talk about for a decade because while this particular chart that is in our deck today only goes to 2016, at various times we've gone back a decade and shown you that the growth in our operating expenses, the costs of running the infrastructure and the network, that growth has been just de minimis, really for a decade. It's a tremendous source of leverage. Of course, the more we can drive revenue growth, the more leverage we can get on this line. We get that leverage from our global scale and from all of the kind of technology and servicing efficiencies in particular that Anré talked about. Risk management. I had a very unusual experience two weeks ago in my nine years, I guess, as CFO here at Amex. I was speaking at a conference. The conference will go unnamed. I did a big tent Q&A and then a couple of group meetings, and in an entire morning I did not get a single question about credit. I thought that was amazing. I also thought it was an amazing compliment to our business model and to our risk management team and to our long track record of having best-in-class credit metrics. Because, you know, we are very proud of the fact that, as I said earlier, we had many years pre-pandemic of growing our lending faster than the industry while driving up net interest yield, while maintaining best-in-class credit metrics. I'd suggest that's a pretty good trifecta. Then I'm particularly pleased by the fact that we went into the pandemic with best-in-class credit metrics, and then the distance between us and our peers actually grew during the pandemic. We think that leaves us very well positioned for the growth we foresee this year and the next couple of years. Certainly in 2022 you should expect to see our write-off and delinquency rates begin to go up. They will not in 2022 get anywhere near where they were pre-pandemic. I fully expect over the long term, these rates to remain best in class. I will point out that I joined the company in 2013. In my first seven years as CFO, every investor meeting, someone would ask me, "Well, when are rates gonna get back to where they were before the great financial crisis?" Of course, in hindsight, we know they never did. I'm just warning you now, if you ask me, "When are rates gonna get back to pre-pandemic levels?" We'll see. Look, the great financial crisis was very, very different from the pandemic, but we have a strong belief in our customer base and our business model, and a strong belief in our risk management team and the capabilities that our integrated model gives us. Okay. We're nearing the homestretch, I promise. Capital for us is a really simple story, right? We produce a tremendous amount of capital. We have a return on equity of over 30%, right? Our target capital ratio is a really simple thing to think about, which is we need our CET1 ratio to be between 10%-11%. That's actually above our regulatory minimum, but it needs to be there based on our view of the access we want to the capital markets and the rating agency view of what our balance sheet should look like. What do we do with all that capital we generate? Priority one is just funding organic growth. Our spend-centric model is not very capital intensive. Generally in a steady-state year only takes 20%-25% of the capital we generate to fund our organic growth. We pay a dividend that you should expect to kinda just grow in line with earnings. We target a 20%-25% payout ratio. We just did a 20% dividend increase to catch up, if you will, to not increasing it during the pandemic. You will periodically see us make more bolt-on acquisitions. I think Howard's discussion of Resy and Anna's discussion of Kabbage are two really good examples of the kinds of things you might see us do periodically. Beyond that, we'll return capital to shareholders to stay within our 10%-11% range. That's the growth plan and how the financial building blocks ladder up to it. I hope you have a better understanding of how the math works behind all the other things you've heard today. We've spent a lot of time, almost three hours, talking about the long term. It is March 16. We're two weeks from closing the books on the first quarter. Let me make a few near-term comments. First, and most important, as we sit here on March 16, we remain very comfortable and confident with the guidance we've given you for full year 2022, and we're sort of formally affirming that guidance, if you will. Today, earnings per share of $9.25-$9.65 and revenue growth of 18%-20%. Next, we've talked a lot today about what we've taken to calling our pandemic recovery tailwinds. If you think about that for a second, it kind of naturally leads to the thought that as we go sequentially through the four quarters of 2022, you should naturally expect our core volumes, revenues, and earnings to sequentially strengthen and sort of ladder up to that full year guidance that we've given you. If you think about the first 75 days of the year and think, well, how are we doing on that, sequential build, goods and services looks great, right? Spending has continued to be really strong, right in line with the kind of exit rate that we had from 2021. If you think about travel and entertainment spend, I will say there was a real dip in January due to the Omicron variant, probably below our expectations for the year, and that continued into the first couple days of February. Boy, travel and entertainment spend then just strongly rebounded in the rest of February. That has continued into March, and frankly, it leaves us very confident with the comments we've made about our full year expectations for travel and entertainment. In some ways, I'd also suggest that short impact from Omicron with a strong rebound is also a little indicative of the fact that our consumers and our small businesses, I would suggest, have gotten better with each medical surge or challenge at just figuring out how to manage their way through it. If you think about credit looks really strong. You see some of the monthly data. If you think about accounting and credit reserves and CECL, so that's not necessarily core. That, you know, that is a little bit more volatile as I think about what might happen from quarter to quarter this year. I think I feel very good about the full year. Like many financial institutions, we entered 2022 with some remnant of more qualitative credit reserves left over from the pandemic. As I sit here today, what decision we might make at the end of Q1 about some of those qualitative reserves looks more uncertain than it might have four weeks ago, given uncertainty in the world, but, you know, we'll have to see what the world looks like in another two weeks. Here's my last near-term comment. When you think about turbulence in the world, Stephen talked about at the beginning, the tragic situation in Russia, Ukraine, not material to our ongoing revenue, earnings or volumes. I did point out publicly a couple weeks ago that should circumstances cause us to completely wind down our business in Russia, that could drive a write-down in the tens of millions of dollars for us in Q1 or sometime later this year. We'll have to see. Beyond the Russia-Ukraine impact, we have not seen an impact anywhere else in the world in our network from that. For that matter, for those of you reading headlines about the BA.2 variant, we haven't seen any impact from the BA.2 variant anywhere in the world. Obviously, any of those things suddenly had a dramatic impact on the global economy, it would be a different story. Hopefully at this point, we have great opportunities. We have some unique competitive advantages from our business model. We're particularly focused on the premium consumer and small businesses as the growth opportunity. We are gonna keep investing to drive growth, and that's what ladders up to the growth plan. Stephen started us by talking a little bit about our 170-year history and the way customers just attach to our brand, a brand that's been built over 170 years. I have not been at American Express for 170 years, as old as I may look. But I have been a public company CFO for 20 years now, and I have done 880 consecutive earnings calls across 3 different industries. In only one of those 80 calls have I said something about targets for growth as aggressive as what we just said 3 years out. I mention that story because I just want you to think about the intersection that Stephen talked about at the beginning of the strategies that we went into the pandemic with, which were producing tremendous results, the added momentum we built during the pandemic, and then the structural shifts that play to our business model. Those are the things that led us to say it's absolutely the right thing to do to set more aspirational targets for this company and to be very transparent about it, which I hope you feel today has helped with. With that, I'm gonna invite people to, like, appear from behind the stage to bring chairs out for Q&A. I'm gonna invite my colleagues to join the stage. I think, Vivian, you're gonna be MC, I believe, the questions and answers, and we're happy to talk about whatever people in the room, and we also have a way for people who are not in the room to ask questions. Right. Thanks. While we are getting settled in here, I just want to talk about for those of you that are in the room, if you have a question- Please raise your hand and wait for a mic to get to you before you start asking. Then for those of you that are joining us via webcast, please know that you can submit a question via the Q&A box that is available on the webcast console. With that, I think if I don't see, there's a hand. Lots here. Sorry. Pick a hand. Lisa. Okay. Lisa, you have the hand. You don't have a mic, though. You get to take it from me. Yeah. Oh, oh, okay. Well, yeah. That'll work. Working on it. They're working on it. We haven't done this in a while. Terrific. Thank you. Lisa Ellis from MoffettNathanson. I think, Stephen, this is maybe a you question. It's an organizational question. It's evident from the increased targets in the presentation today that the pandemic kind of gave Amex a shot in the arm and drove the company to, I'd say, reinvigorate a lot of your products. Can you just talk about, like, kind of organizationally looking back over this timeframe, what drove that and how you're institutionalizing it so that you make sure this continues on an ongoing basis going forward? Yeah. Look, I think that even pre-pandemic, we had committed to reinvigorating our products on an ongoing basis. I think the key thing in the pandemic for us was, you know, we had planned for a credit crisis. We didn't get a credit crisis, we got a pandemic. You know, the credit crisis playbook really worked for us. You know, the two driving things, and I've said this many times on earnings calls and at other times, is we wanted to focus on our brand and on our customers. It would've been very easy to pull back all the way and not invest. If you look at what we did, we invested in our customers, and we invested in the brand. We invested in our customers by putting more value in, you know, through value injection and things like that. We stood behind our customers with, you know, our financial relief programs. You know, I think as we went through this, we didn't stop the machinery. You know, we committed to no layoffs. We didn't cut our development. The only thing we stopped really was customer acquisition because we didn't have great line of sight. We didn't stop our product refreshes, and so as we came out, our plan always was to, you know, to come out, what we said internally, come out roaring. You know, that was the expression that we had. You know, for us, we've all been around. Well, not all of us, but some of us, like Doug with the gray beard down there. We've been around a long time, and you know, we've learned a lot, and we've been through a lot. You know, we've been through the financial crisis. We were through 9/11. We were through our self-imposed Costco crisis. What we learned was, you know, you need to come out strong when you have a situation that you're following. We had committed to doing that prior to that happening. What was very encouraging in looking at this team here and the entire organization is that we all stuck to it. You know, they say don't waste a good crisis, right? I don't think we did. You saw what happened. We had retention rates that, for us, were historic. We always had great retention rates, and, you know, if our write-off rates were good. Everybody's write-off rates improved, but even the disparity between us and our competitors got even greater. You know, we felt really good about the plan we had going in, and we just stuck through it. That's where we are right now. That's why, you know, we had the confidence to come up with, you know, sort of this aspiration because as I talked about, we had this virtuous cycle, and it really becomes a flywheel for us. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I apologize. You got Bill. His hand was up. I got Bill at the back. I'm not supposed to have him sit, but you have Bill. Thanks. Bill Carcache with Wolfe Research. It seems clear that what you're seeing in the data makes you feel emboldened to give the kind of, you know, the outlook that you've given. Could you speak to concerns that perhaps what you're seeing in the data may be sort of flattered by some of the elevated investment spending that you're doing or, you know, and the extent to which it may not be sustainable as we move further beyond the pandemic and perhaps some of that spending subsides, broadly speaking? Yeah, no. You know, look, I think that, you know, as we look at the spending that we're doing, you know, we go through a very rigorous investment optimization process. You know, as we look at our acquisition spending, we feel as comfortable about it today as we've ever had. We also believe as we've sort of looked at this, the premium space has gotten a lot wider for us. I mean, you know, when we used to look at the premium space, you know, we sort of looked at, you know, Gen X and Baby Boomers. Now when you look at Millennials and you look at Gen Z, it's a broader base for us. As Howard put up on the slide, you know, these are people that have, you know, great credit scores and ultimately will have as high spending but will be with us longer, especially if we can keep our retention levels going the way they are. If you look at the spending, you know, I think, you know, we've been able to penetrate wallets a lot better, you know, during the pandemic. I think a lot of the value injection that we initiated helped to do that tremendously. You know, look, we got the tailwinds from T&E. I mean, we see consumer T&E rising, and consumer T&E has risen above where 2019 levels were, which was, you know, pretty good for us. We see small business and corporate eventually coming back. Right now we feel really good about the plan. You know, to be perfectly honest, we didn't have much of a choice. Rather than to provide guidance of 18%-20%. You know, when you disclose and that's what you need to do. We really didn't have much choice in doing that. We feel really comfortable and confident about it. What we also wanted to do was to give line of sight into, you know, it's not gonna be 18%-20% every year because, you know, you do have those structural changes which give you that lift, but then you have the tailwinds, and as those tailwinds subside, you get into a normal glide zone. As we do our planning, glide zone for us shows us 10% revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth. The other macro comments, Bill, I would make is if you look at our revenue growth relative to others, we're outpacing the industry. If you look at Howard Grosfield and Anna Marrs showed some segment numbers, and I showed you in my slides the almost one-third increase in the B2B business acquired versus where we were in 2019. We're at record levels of retention. We would suggest our spending is not just to keep us in place. It is producing results that we have not seen before, including the record acquisition of Platinum customers in both consumer and small business. We feel really good about the results we're getting. We don't think we're making these decisions on an assumption about what's gonna happen. To Stephen Squeri's point, we're just building upon the results we're seeing. One question all the way in the back. I think you raised your hand. Yeah. Thanks very much. John Hecht with Jefferies. You guys used to describe growth of B2B business as sort of a function of GDP. I think it was like a multiplier of GDP, and I haven't heard that for years. You're now kinda committing to longer term growth rates that are higher than past growth rates, and I'm wondering, is that do you see now that your ability to grow is driven by, there's less of a function of GDP and you have more paths to growth that you can execute on? Is there some kind of commentary that you might have around that opportunity? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I think I've been here nine years, John. My guess is you've covered the company longer than that. Because we stopped talking about that GDP correlation many years ago because you can't find it if you go run a whole bunch of regressions. You know, we service a particular group of premium consumers, a particular group of small businesses. Certainly, a generally healthy economy is important to us, and a generally unhealthy economy is not a good thing. That direct correlation to GDP, I would not focus on. Instead, what I would focus on is what I was trying to do in my presentation to show you here's where we were pre-pandemic. Everyone to my right here told you all the things that have changed, and that leads you to why we think we can do even a little bit better in a generally healthy economy. I would also say at the end here that a little bit of inflation will help us. Sanjay. Thank you. Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. I thought Anna's presentation was very clear in terms of your size and scale in SME. I know it's not a winner-take-all situation there, but is there anything the fintechs are doing better than you? Obviously, I'm trying to reconcile the valuations out there and investors' sort of expectation that they're gonna become big players. Maybe you could just address that, and I'll just ask my follow-up question just on the network. Similar type of question. Is there anything more you could do with the network, especially in some of the markets where maybe the proprietary business may not become as large for the foreseeable future? Just trying to get some thoughts. Anna will hit the first one, and then Raymond will take the second. Great. I said in the presentation that my team and I do spend a lot of time studying, meeting with, learning about the various fintechs out there. We see a couple of things as they go and raise money and support those valuations. The first is they're talking about the same structural trends we talked about today. That shift, that digitization of payments, the $1 trillion of the melting iceberg of paper checks. It's a real opportunity, and so it's unsurprising that others are trying to capture it. The other thing we see is I put up that 45% of U.S. SME card billions share that is American Express, and it's such an extraordinary number. Attacking American Express is a good story, right? If you're out there raising money. I would say they're both, to be honest, threats and opportunities. Absolutely, there are times we'll compete against one of those business card startups in the market. You know, more often than not, we win, but still, of course, they're out there trying to win business. The opportunity part is real. I talked about some of those partnerships we're forming, whether it's expense management players or virtual card platforms, as a way of really opening the kinda aperture that we have to capture that melting iceberg of digitizing payments. We'll keep studying them for a while. I think they'll remain both threat and opportunity. The good news is we all agree on those structural trends that give us confidence in the growth path. With respect to the network and what we can do, we are the proprietary issuer in I think 23 markets. We're the proprietary acquirer in about 30 markets. We operate in 198 countries and territories, and our global network services business is really there to support coverage by forming partnerships with the leading banks and bank acquirers in those markets. Frequently, what we'll do is we'll form the partnership with them for the acquiring, but We'll also offer them the ability to license American Express brand, and they can be the issuer in those markets so that there's greater insistence at the point of sale, and those two pieces go together. A lot of that growth that I mentioned, the doubling of international, has come from just that. In those markets where we have the partnerships through the local banks, multi-issuers, multi-acquirers in those markets to allow us to gain far greater scale and allow the merchants to see more merchants than just the proprietary issued products. It's been a great strategy, and I think in 2017, end of 2017 when we laid out that international strategy, we identified those markets where we really wanted to accelerate the coverage and empower the team to go out and form those partnerships. The only other thing I would add is that, you know, to just build on your question a little bit, is that, you know, you ask could we do other things with the network and, you know, the reason we have debit cards in the United States right now is because of what we did with the network in China. You know, I'm sitting on the stage now for sort of 17 or 18 years, and, you know, every time, "Well, we'll never have a debit card. We're not gonna have a debit card. We're not gonna have a debit card." You know, in China rather, you know, we had, as we went in, we modified the network. We're able to handle debit transactions and, you know, given that the world has gone so digital, you don't need brick-and-mortar to have deposits. Our high yield savings went so well that we launched, you know, the checking account and a companion debit. You know, in consumer, we did the same thing. There's a great example of sort of, you know, doing something different with the network. Yeah, and I think there are other opportunities for us with the network over time, and we'll just see how that goes. We're not standing still. We've modernized it. We've invested quite a bit. You know, Anna talked a little bit about it, and Raymond talked a little bit about it. As we make it a little bit more flexible and a little bit more agile, it gives us more degrees of freedom. Mihir. Thank you. Mihir Bhatia, Bank of America. I actually wanted to ask a follow-up on that point about the debit functionality and introducing, you know, banking transactions. You had a couple of slides, Anna, about, you know, banks. Small businesses want one institution to provide all that. Is the goal with the business checking and the debit functionality, and I think you've also introduced it on the consumer side, so kind of relevant to that, to become people's primary bank account? Is that the longer term goal here with those products, or is it just a, you know, an add-on that you provide some people there? When you ask a small business who's primary for them, like who's essential to run their business, many of them do say their American Express card. We love that answer. Others say, naturally, their checking account, right? It's money coming out, but also money going in. That's very important to running a small business, and it gives you so much data, which you can use for all kinds of things, building primary relationships, providing them with more credit. It's an incredibly useful thing to put in the heart really of as many small business relationships as we can over time. It leads from us, right? Which is a card company at the heart. We'll always lead with a card most probably, but the account provides that additional stickiness. That's the way we think about it. It's brand new. We just launched it in October. We're very excited to get it out there also with the debit capability, and we hope it builds more of those sticky, more primary, longer lasting data-informed relationships over time. Howard, do you wanna just talk a little bit about it from a consumer perspective, or Doug? I'll take it. I think, Mihir, whether it's a primary or secondary, the customer will end up making that choice. We are determined to build in the critical functionality to make it a primary account for those that choose to use it that way. We think it gives us great opportunity, especially, you know, Howard talked a lot about Gen Z and millennial segments. There's a preference for debit in certain transaction types within those demographics. We wanna serve that fully and well. You know, there are certain industries that surcharge credit transactions. We want our customers to have an American Express alternative when they make the choice to avoid that surcharge. We love the product, right? I mean, it's difficult to find a product that is as compelling in terms of rewards on debit, a relatively competitive APY from an established brand with a reputation for trust and service. Next question is coming from one of our virtual attendees, David Yowan from ClearBridge. Can you clarify what computing is currently in the public cloud and what is in the private cloud? It sounded like most computing has been modernized and is cloud native, but then you said big data and the authorization platform need to be modernized. Anré, you wanna? Sure. I think that, let me clarify. What I talked about was our philosophy and our journey and where we wanna go, and that we want to be able to leverage both, internal private cloud and external public cloud to have the capabilities we need to be able to give us the functionality to be able to grow into the future. Right now, about, you know, 30% of our infrastructure and mainframes are done internally. We leverage the private cloud for the 60%. Maybe 10% right now is on the public cloud, but that's gonna grow over time as we, you know, move big data into the cloud and also as we leverage applications from new partnerships and new entities that we think will give us capabilities that we need. It'll evolve over time. Betsy? Thanks. Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley. Thanks very much for the day. It was extremely interesting, and you unpacked a lot of questions that we've had. One thing I wanted to see if we could talk a little bit more about is account acquisition and how you're thinking about driving that, accelerating account acquisition. If I recall correctly, pre-pandemic, I think Delta was something around 25% of account acquisition. I don't remember if that's the right number exactly or not. Maybe we get a little bit more understanding as to how much Delta's driving new accounts today, as well as how you're thinking about new channels for account acquisition. I know you mentioned Resy. I would think sitting from where I am that that might be a slightly more efficient way for you to drive account growth, but maybe not as the same scale as Delta. If those are my bookends, maybe I could understand how you're thinking about driving that account acquisition, both in consumer and SME. I'm gonna let Howard start with consumer, and then Anna will jump in from an SME perspective. Yeah, I think, you know, it's an important question. I think first and foremost, as we talk about co-brand, that's an and, right? That'll continue to be a focus and continue to be a growth engine for us. A lot of the acquisition happens, as you know, through our partner channels, which are extremely efficient in their own right. As travel demand returns back to the hotel and travel sites, we benefit to a large extent from the acquisitions, and that'll continue to recover and continue to be a core focus for us. You correctly picked up on how we continue to diversify the way in which we acquire customers. What I would say sort of stepping back and underpinning that is, you know, we've been arguably one of the oldest direct-to-consumer companies in existence. When we launched the card in 1958, we competed against the competitors who did face-to-face channel-based acquisitions. The DNA of our acquisition engine is very much a data-driven, direct-to-consumer model that is constantly looking for ways to innovate and expand into new channels like Resy but also drive greater efficiency with the channels we have. As you saw in the presentation today, our efficiency will increase over time, not only with the channels we have. We'll continue to test and try partnerships, expand into things like Resy and Member get Member to continue to diversify and ultimately improve the overall investment efficiency. I put up a slide for small business that showed 600,000 new small business accounts acquired in 2021 and 1 million customers targeted, I said. You know, offered an additional product or service. And that's on the back of a similarly diverse set of channels that we quite like. It's co-brand partners, you know, not just travel, but also goods and services partners like a Lowe's or an Amazon, and then the many other channels we have from, you know, advertising through to a sales organization. The right-hand side though, those customer marketing channels, I think there's some quite exciting things ahead. Targeted 1 million customers last year. That's fantastic. It's an important source of growth. As we expand into some of these other products, whether it's the checking account products or AP automation, it increases the touch points we have with customers. Anré gave a great example of how we leverage our servicing channels as one of those touch points, and these digital products also create additional opportunities within our customer base. The answer overall is I like what we have, but some of those digital touch points, Resy and consumer, Kabbage and accounts in small business will also open the opportunities to be talking more to our customers and doing more. Don? Thanks. Donald Fandetti, Wells Fargo. I guess this is for Anré. You know, a big benefit that or differentiator for Amex is the experiential benefits, that you provide. I guess, is there, like, a technology competitive advantage associated with that? Because, you know, we see, like, JP Morgan bought cxLoyalty. Capital One's trying to build out a travel portal. Is it hard to sort of replicate what you have, and is everything under one umbrella for you, or do you use third parties? Just trying to understand the competitive advantage and how hard it is to replicate. We partner with other companies to have the underlying technology, but I think the way we approach it might be different from other companies, that we really do focus on the customer and the customer experience and member moments that matter and trying to make sure we do everything from a perspective of having a long-term view of retaining the customer and having a relationship, that they don't just own our product, but they're part of a membership and we have their back. I think the technology gives us certain capabilities to be able to recognize whether someone goes on the website, then they call in and we can see the same information. I think a lot of financial institutions can do that. When I think of something like the financial relief program that we had and how we supported people during the pandemic was a philosophical approach of how we would service through credit and through customer service when card members would call in, they were at stress, whether they were consumers or small business, and what we would do for them. That's leveraging the technology in a way that fits with our philosophy that's different than what another financial institution would do. I don't think the technology that we use necessarily is more unique, but I think it's how we deploy it along with our philosophy, which is a bit of our secret sauce. I mean, I think our secret sauce or competitive advantage there is largely around our brand and our customer base. Our brand is distinctive in financial services in that it has the elements of a financial services brand around trust and security. There's an aspirational lifestyle wrapper around that brand where we are, I would say, differentially credible in talking about dining or travel or experiences or access. The customer base advantage, and a number of people talked about it, comes from the fact that if you look at some of the programs we operate, like Fine Hotels and Resorts, which I fully expect Chase or Capital One or somebody will try and stand up, what we have is marketing access to a very large demonstrably premium base of consumers that hoteliers are dying to get in property and are willing to put up substantial resources in exchange for that advertising placement that we give them. You know, I think we've seen it over the last couple years since, say, the introduction of Sapphire Reserve. It increases competition, but it has also increased interest in the category. As the category leader, if we do our work, we differentially benefit from that, I think. Mark? Hi, Mark DeVries from Barclays. I had a question about the virtuous cycle. Do you expect that that's gonna make it easy for you to continue to layer on new kinda merchant-funded benefits to the cards? Or does it get to a point at which it's harder to find new brands that kind of align with what you're trying to create? And then how do you think about how much more customers are willing to spend in kind of annual fee to pay or pay for the added value that you add on? Let me answer the second question first. You know, we charge for value. How high it goes, how far it goes, it's a function of how much value that we're offering and what the competitive dynamic is, right? If you look at the value you get from these products today, it far outstrips the fee. As far as are there other merchants, partners, I mean, I think Doug just said it. We have an enviable base of customers. Even if you look at sort of our Amex Offers platform, you know, that thing has grown substantially over the last four or five years, and you know, up to a thousand national brands. What's gonna happen is, you know, it'll continue to grow. You know, we have, as our base gets even broader and wider, you know, having even more national brands, differentiated brands, local brands, what have you, that speak to specific card members in specific geographies and in specific segments is gonna be important for us and something that we'll access. I think that virtuous cycle for us is, you know, almost at the beginning. You know, 'cause we've realized over the last couple of years, this goes back to Lisa's point earlier, what we've realized is that the premium space is a lot bigger than we initially thought, and by investing more, we're gonna get more out of it. You know, that's where we are, and I think that virtuous cycle continues, and I think it becomes very interesting for partners, and it becomes very interesting for other merchants. The opportunities for that virtuous cycle is when we talk about it a lot, we talk about it mostly in the United States. That opportunity is available for us internationally as well, and one we haven't exploited to the same extent we have in the United States. In the United States, you have underlying parity coverage. You have complete utility with this card now. You have even more and more value added on top of it. We feel real good about it. Another question from virtual audience. Bob Napoli from William Blair. We continue to see increases in payment fraud with the increasing share from online. How does Amex both protect against payment fraud and maintain high authorization or approval rates? We do a better job than everybody else. You know, look, without going into you know, obviously algorithms and what have you know, listen, here's the tremendous advantage of the closed loop. You know, this is where the data analytics you know, is tremendous for us and our insights and lots and lots of experience. We've had you know. Our fraud has always been like half of what you know, the other networks has been. I'm answering to Vivian. I you know, I don't know who to talk to. You know, but it's always been half. You know, as fraud has moved from offline to online, we've still kept that same advantage, and that advantage is really driven by our data and by our algorithms and by a tremendous fraud team. I would just point out, 'cause we didn't show it, if you look in the appendix at the slides that are posted online, we have a slide showing our fraud rates versus the industry. To Stephen's point, it's a tremendous value to our card members, and it's a tremendous value to our merchants that we're so far below the other networks. Yeah, we need a mic. Hi, Heather Takahashi from Thrivent. Your new account acquisitions were 75% Millennials and Gen Zs. Such a high proportion, what drove that? Is that sustainable going forward? Gonna let Howard answer that. It was 75% on Platinum and- Yeah Gold. Howard, go ahead. Yeah. It was so we've taken it from 40%-60% of share of new acquisitions across the portfolio and 75% on Platinum and Gold. Our playbook has really been a journey that goes back to before we diversified our products into lifestyle-related services. I think we've been doubling down and making investments to make our products resonate, and that's why it's been growing continuously over time. Then more recently, as we diversified the suite of services and leveraged the role partners play to bring brands into the conversation to sort of enhance travel- Bring lifestyle services plus brands, we're now appealing to a much wider segment of the millennial and Gen Z population. That's piece one. Piece two, as we talked about at one of the last slides, the premium fee-based market's growing at 16%. We're growing at 14%. The millennial and Gen Z piece is growing at 12%. We think that this long-term and long runway will continue because that is the segment that is growing disproportionately at twice the rate of the premium fee-based market. In the front. Hi. Arren Cyganovich from Citigroup. Some of your competitor payment networks have been in the press recently that they may be raising their merchant discount pricing. How is that likely to affect your business? And should you have a little bit more pricing power to the extent that they are successful in increasing pricing? Raymond? The first thing that I'd say is we don't have interchange. We have just discount rates. What we've been focused on over the last several years is as we gain coverage, making sure that we are growing discount revenue, and Jeff showed kind of the last eight quarters of what's most important is profitable incremental discount revenue growth. What we also have is we have our partners. One of the benefits from, if I take the U.S. as an example, we price with our partners. They turn around and price for the merchants themselves, and a lot of them bundle the price. What's really helped us, if you look at a lot of the aggregators out there, they will sell in card acceptance for Visa, American Express and American Express and Visa, Mastercard at the same price to those smaller merchants. It makes it really simple and easy for the merchants to accept card payments, all at the same price. We are comfortable with our pricing with the partners ourselves, but the end price is set by those partners. Visa, Mastercard, the other networks may be doing one thing or another. We're comfortable with our pricing. Where we need to sometimes we will make sure that we're pricing for value. Howard and Anna both showed that our card members spend a lot more, and when we can demonstrate that value, we will price appropriately. Dominick in the back. Thank you so much. Dominick Gabriele from Oppenheimer. You know, AXP has significant market share, but there's really a lot of room to run. You provided sort of that 11% digital payment growth rate through 2026 in particular, which I believe was an industry metric. Can you just talk about the band around that 11% number and what the pushes and pulls are and how American Express can position themselves to exceed the industry growth rates within SMB? Thanks so much. Great. Yes, I love that chart, and I've seen some of you use versions of that chart about the digitization of small business payments, and it truly is a structural shift that's happening. It's one of those shifts that's great for our customers because they take a whole lot of efficiency and cost out of their businesses and great for us as we stand there with our bucket seeking to catch the maximum amount of that payment. It's an industry estimate. It's 11% for those digital payments, and it's hard to say exactly what the ups and downs will be. Obviously, the overall economy would drive an increase or decrease. Inflation, we've talked about driving an increase or decrease. We really do believe that structural trend of small businesses finding the check a fundamentally inefficient tool is happening. It makes no sense really that the U.S. has, you know, 40% of small business payment volume on paper checks. It's operationally inefficient and it's inefficient from a funding perspective. You know, it takes so long for that check to for the invoice to arrive, often on a PDF and the check to be made. So, you know, it's hard to say for sure. We think the 11%'s a reasonable estimate, and what we're focused on is getting the best bucket possible to capture the maximum amount of those payments on card or via another payment rail. In the back. Hi. Meng Jiao, Deutsche Bank. Amex clearly has a lot of positive momentum and tailwinds going forward in the next couple of years. You know, Stephen, I just wanted to get your opinion on what sort of keeps you awake at night in terms of concerns. Is it primarily a global macro shock event that we saw with the pandemic, or is there sort of anything else that you're concerned about that we should be aware of? Thanks. Look, I've been around here for now almost 37 years. There's been a lot that's kept me up at night and, you know, I thought I saw it all until the pandemic. You don't know. I mean, when I look at our business right now, it's more of the unknown that keeps me up at night. You know, I've seen a lot of unknowns, you know, going from 9/11 to the financial crisis to the pandemic, and now you've got, you know, you've got the Ukraine-Russia war, which is not a real big impact to our company or our business or to the economy at the moment, but who knows? I think, you know, the world's a very different place than it probably was when a lot of my colleagues and I started. I think it's more global economic, regulatory, political events that it's just really hard to plan for. We do the best that we can. I think that our Winning Through the Cycle planning and inflationary planning that we do and things like that, you see if you can adapt those sort of disaster scenarios to fit it. There isn't anything specific that we're worried about. In fact, as we think about it You know, we feel really good about our business, and we feel really good about not only the structural shifts, but the momentum from executing our strategy and these tailwinds. You always have that watch-out, right? I mean, you have that watch-out of what's happening in the environment that you just don't have any control over. When that gets to it, as Lisa started with the question, how do you then react to it? Then what do you learn from it? Then how do you go? We've been around 172 years. There's been a lot of stuff that's gone on over those 172 years. This company has morphed itself. This company's adapted to those situations, and we'll continue to do that. John in the back. John Pancari, Evercore ISI. Just to piggyback on that question, how sensitive are your aspirational goals for 2024 and beyond, and even 2023? How sensitive are those numbers to the macro backdrop in terms of, I mean, we could see a pullback in global travel incrementally here amid the war. We could see- Yeah. impacts of the sharp rise in interest rates. If you could just talk about the sensitivity to your projections. You know, when you think about our long-term growth aspirations, the only thing I would say is we need a generally healthy economy. We talked earlier about don't get overly concerned about 2% GDP growth versus 3% growth, because it's the core fundamentals of our business and our customers that are driving this. Now, you know, this quarter versus next quarter's results, yes, those will be shaped by exactly the pace of different customer types and T&E recovery, et cetera. But the long-term growth aspirations are shaped by, I come back to the strategies, the opportunities and the momentum we have and the structural shifts. A lot of the other things that we've talked about are gonna vary in the short term quarter to quarter. They don't change the fact that that's the right aspiration for all of us as a company to be chasing, and all we need is a generally healthy economy. At back. Thank you. John Pregmon from Artisan Partners. I was just curious about in the pre-pandemic slides you showed, Amex was doing 8%-10% revenue growth and I think 12%-13% EPS growth in the years you showed. Now we're expecting higher revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth. Is the channel between the two likely to be the same, or is there a higher degree of, I suppose, it could be operating leverage or repurchases that get you to higher EPS growth than revenue growth? I'm wondering if the delta between the two is gonna be different now. Well, I think the only thing that's really different is the fact that it goes back to what I think almost every speaker talked about, which is one of our conclusions from the last few years is that investing more in all the things we talked about pays off in higher levels of revenue growth, which gives you a platform to get even more operating expense and marketing leverage than we historically were. Capital, there's no change to how we think about capital. But that is the difference, right? If you think about all the charts I just showed you, the biggest difference is that change in the variable customer engagement costs. That, to us, is a fundamental strategic learning that we think is absolutely the right thing to do to drive the most revenue growth and earnings growth in the longer term, and that's what I would focus on. Got another question, a virtual audience. Lino Sergo from Van Cleef Asset Management. The general sense is that AXP supported its co-brand partners during the COVID related shutdown. Considering how painful COVID was to the global airline and hotel industry, is there greater opportunity to bring on additional partners that may view a partnership with AXP superior than their existing partner? We always look at opportunities. I can't answer the virtual questions. I don't know who to look at. Very confusing for me. There is always opportunities to look at additional co-brand partners, and we do it all the time. The reality is that we have over 50 co-brand partnerships in the world, and some of those range from co-brand partnerships that are just card related to all the way with Delta where it is such a 360 integrated relationship, which is travel related, consumer travel, business travel, Membership Rewards, lounges. You just can go on a corporate card, so forth. You go on and on. We're always looking for those. You know, we're always look at those opportunities where you can add value. I mean, one of the huge advantages from a co-brand perspective is obviously distribution and value proposition. You know, if it's the right value proposition and you know, we feel that it works from a brand perspective and a partnership perspective, we'll certainly look at it, and we do look at them all the time. We feel really good with the lineup of co-brand partners that we have right now across a wide variety of industries, both from an SME perspective and a consumer perspective. One more plug for the appendix. We did put in the appendix a current listing of the largest co-brand partners, 'cause I know that's information many of you have tracked over time. Great. We are right on time. Right on. I don't think. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Do you wanna wrap up or anything, Stephen? Well, first of all, it's great to see everybody here. You know, obviously not the same turnout that we would've gotten back in 2019, but you're all warriors to come here today. We had to fill in with some Amex people too, so that we felt good. But look, we appreciate you following us and for all those on the phone and the webcast as well. We truly appreciate your interest in our company, and we hope that today we've given you some more confidence in what our growth plan is. We look to see all of you real soon in person again. Thank you very much for coming.