American Express Company (AXP) KBW Fintech Payments Conference (Transcript)

American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) KBW Fintech Payments Conference Call February 28, 2023 10:15 AM ET

Company Participants

Jeffrey Campbell - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Sanjay Sakhrani - KBW

Sanjay Sakhrani

Jeff has helped oversee a period of pretty remarkable growth and innovation for the company. And obviously, lots of challenges as well, which you’ve navigated quite remarkably through. So it’s really nice to have him join us for a chat today.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Sanjay Sakhrani

Let’s start with the economy because that’s the elephant in the room, I feel. We’re asking everyone that’s sort of exposed to the consumer to give their perspectives on how they’re seeing things unfold at the current time because the backdrop is pretty much in flux.

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, first, thanks for having me here, Sanjay. It’s good to be here, and thanks for all of your interest in American Express. I think I should probably start, Sanjay, whenever anyone asks about the economy, I always do start by reminding people that when you think about American Express, we are not necessarily representative of the entirety of the global economy. We serve around the world in many, many, many countries, a very premium group of consumers, we serve select segments of small businesses, and then we serve the largest corporations in the world. So everything I say about the economy, it’s important to put it in the context of who we’re talking about. And so when you go back really, Sanjay, to our January earnings call, we finished a year of tremendous growth, tremendous strength across all of those customer segments, and we laid out what we thought was pretty bold and ambitious guidance for 2023. So as we sit here on, what’s the date today? February 28, what I’d say is things are really playing out exactly as we would have expected based on how we finished 2022 and the guidance we laid out. In particular, that means if you think about the fact that the first 2 months of 2023, you are lapping a 2022 January and February that were impacted by Omicron. So if you were to look at year-over-year volume rates, in January, February, they are certainly up from Q4, but we would have expected that, and I’d expect them to asymptote back towards about where we were in Q4. Similarly, the other thing you would have expected is that well, early in 2022, much of the U.S. economy, again, in terms of our customer base was pretty well recovered. Outside the U.S., you still saw some weakness early in 2022. So you see pretty strong year-over-year growth rates in the first 2 months of 2023 when you look at our business outside the U.S.

So it’s going well. We don’t see any particular change from all the trends that we talked about in Q4 on the January earnings call. And I think it sets us up well, if you don’t mind, let me maybe just expand on that – so we did give guidance for 2023, revenue growth between 15% and 17%, earnings per share between $11.00 and $11.40. 2 months in, we feel really good about both those numbers. I’d probably make two observations about that. We do run the company for the long term. And so we think about our results over the course of a year. When you think about quarter-to-quarter, and I know that’s part of your job, Sanjay, I’d remind you probably of 2 things. There’s always a little bit of quarterly volatility in our numbers, mark-to-markets, around our investment portfolio, CECL timing varies a little bit across the industry, all that tends to wash out over the course of a year, which is why we focus on the year.

The other thing I would really remind people of is, we are growing revenues now at a very high rate. And when you’re growing your revenues between 15% and 17%, it means even as you go sequentially through the year, you’re adding a significant amount of revenue by the time you get to Q4 versus Q1. And of course, you would expect, Sanjay, the underlying earnings to also grow sequentially along with this. So we feel good 2 months into the year about our aggressive growth targets and all the headlines that we all read every day, our particular mix of customers around the globe is holding up very strongly.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Is there anything specific about this quarterly cadence that you’re talking about in terms of CECL or anything, no?

Jeffrey Campbell

No. I am just making the general observation.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Yes, okay. One of the data points we got from some of the B2B companies is just SME, SMB weakness in spending. Do you see any of that?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, so as you recall, Sanjay, in Q4, when you looked across all of our various customer types, the slowest growth was with the U.S. Small and Midsized enterprise segment, it grew 8% in Q4. And in particular, we called out probably the one noticeable area that I don’t think surprises anyone when you think about what others are saying is that a portion of our U.S. Small Business customer base will use the product to purchase a lot of digital advertising, and that was particularly weak, not showing much growth in Q4. If you look at the first 2 months, it’s actually rebounded a little bit in terms of overall spend for that group. Digital advertising still looks as weak as it did in Q4. But I would say those trends are consistent with what we would have expected and what we’ve laid out in our overall guidance. The other observation I would make is that our own definition of what we stick in that Small and Midsized enterprise segment, includes quite a range of business. So it’s the plumber, who’s a sole contractor to a business that has a couple of hundred million dollars a year in revenue. If you were to look at it by customer size, I would say it’s probably a little weaker in that middle, larger segment than it is in the small, very small business.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Got it. Alright. So maybe we shift gears and talk about the business. I think you guys have done a remarkable job, sort of distancing yourself from the competition. I know we spent many years talking about the competitive backdrop and why things could end up being very different than they have ended up being. Could you maybe talk about the one to three things that really drove the separation in your mind?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, let me maybe back up and make a few comments. First, I think when the subject of competition comes up, Sanjay, often people ask that question or bring up that topic with the mindset of the U.S. consumer – premium consumer, in particular market and that is certainly, by far, the most competitive part of our business. I’d remind you, it’s about 35% to 40% of the business. When you think about our business outside the U.S., about one-third of our business, it tends to be – we have competitors who are frankly more fragmented, probably a little less focused on our particular segments. And when you look at the small business market in the U.S., certainly competitive, but probably not quite as extreme in terms of the number of competitors as what you see in U.S. Consumer.

So now let me just talk about that U.S. consumer marketplace. And look, it’s not new. It’s been highly, highly competitive. I would say, with a real step function increase in the competitiveness post great financial crisis. So you’re 15 years in now, Sanjay, and it became so competitive post great financial crisis because many of our big U.S. money center competitors realized, wow, this is a very attractive business at American Express, and they hired some American Express alumni and said go replicate everything that American Express is doing. So that’s not new. This is why we have to constantly innovate. We have to constantly reinforce the value of our brand and service, which is very hard for others to replicate.

And it’s why I often describe, Sanjay, the growth plan – the new growth plan that we introduced last January as both offensive and defensive. Because one of the biggest advantages we have versus our very good competitors is just the sheer size and attractiveness of our premium consumer and small business customer base. Why is that so important? It’s because it allows us to attract partners who want access to our customer base. And those partners are willing to help fund many of the value propositions that we have in a market like the U.S. for our premium consumers and for small businesses. And the faster we can grow that customer base, the more attractive we are to partners and the faster we can grow that customer base, the more difficult it is for our competitors to catch up to us or to be as attractive to partners as we are. So there is 101 things that go into what we do that have allowed us to maintain a lead versus the competition in our segments, premium consumer, small business and then the largest corporations of the world, although for the largest corporations we are predominantly meeting their travel needs. That is a sort of small but very different part of our business, small, but important, I don’t mean to downplay, but it’s probably less than 5% of our volumes. But the brand, the level for service and the aspirational nature of what we do are all the kinds of things that we are constantly reinforcing to try to make sure we are innovating and staying ahead of the very real competition that we’ve had for many, many years, all of whom are working hard to catch up to us.

Sanjay Sakhrani

You have also been very effective with Millennials and Gen Z. What changed?

Jeffrey Campbell

So my answer, again – and maybe to ground everyone, if you look in – we’ll stay with the U.S. Consumer for a minute. If you look at that U.S. Consumer business, our premium products in 2022, which are the Platinum and Gold – we have many other products, but those are the two largest and most important from a U.S. Consumer perspective. Around 75% of the new people we brought into the franchise in 2022 were Millennial and Gen Z. And while we’ve always had some portion of our customer base that was young, you are correct, if I went back 20 years, Sanjay, it would not be that high a number. And I would say probably starting, if you go back kind of 7, 8 years ago, we began to realize that we needed to do a better job of being attractive to that younger demographic. And there’s not any one, two or three things, Sanjay, that changed, it’s 100 things about the value propositions. It’s about how we choose to market, about the digital capabilities, about the positioning of the brand. And so as we have evolved many, many things, I think we have landed in a place where our brand has always been aspirational, to also aspirational for that younger generation. Our brand has also been one that is associated with permission, frankly, that our members give us to offer a broader range of travel and lifestyle features, and we do that. Our brand has always been one that is attractive to partners, as I mentioned a minute ago, and we really have thought about the partner set, not only in terms of what partners want access to our customers, but which are actually of most interest to that younger demographic. And our digital capabilities are really important here.

One of our now largest sources of new members in the Consumer business is a program we call Member Get-Member, and this is where, it’s all done digitally, you’re a Card Member we will say, boy, we will give you a little bit of an incentive if you bring us your friends. And they come in and it’s one of our largest sources now of new Card Members. And I do think that’s a statement about the brand and the aspirational nature of it, which is difficult for others to replicate. And overwhelmingly, it’s used by the younger Card Members. So I’ll admit, it’s not people my age who are helping us with this Member Get-Member and the digital engagement.

And what you find when you track the behaviors of our younger Card Members who participate in this particular part of our product line is, boy, if somebody convinces one of their friends to become a member, suddenly, they feel a certain obligation almost to continue to demonstrate, yes, this is really, this is good value. So they become a more dedicated Card Member. Their friends who they bring in feel a certain obligation because, Sanjay, you brought me in, I guess I should try this. Our younger Card Members tend to be much more digitally engaged. They tend to be, frankly, more engaged with all aspects of the value proposition. They are very savvy about the value we put into our value proposition, why are people - to use the U.S. number willing to pay $695 for a product they can get free from others? Well because of the value proposition and our younger Card Members, I would suggest, are the best at saying okay, here’s what I’m going to get from the hotel offers, and here’s what I’m going to get from the media offers, and here’s what I’m going to do with different things, and that’s how they get comfortable that this is a very good economic proposition for them.

Sanjay Sakhrani

I’ve been a great lead gen for the Delta cards, I’m a big Delta guy.

Jeffrey Campbell

Okay. Thank you.

Sanjay Sakhrani

So it is a great card. I guess you talked about U.S. Consumer, maybe we can talk a little bit about International Consumer. Where are the opportunities there? Because it would – I mean it’s growing nicely. It would just seem like you could use the same playbook as you do here, over there?

Jeffrey Campbell

So a couple of comments. First, as you would recall, Sanjay, if you go back 2018, 2019, pre-pandemic, the fastest two growing parts of our business were the International Consumer business and the International Small Business segment. Those segments, though, are still a little bit more travel and entertainment oriented than what you see in the U.S., so they were hit harder by the pandemic, and they are coming roaring back, and I would expect them to resume being the fastest growing parts of our business. The competitive world is very different outside the U.S. In the U.S., it is very competitive, premium consumer and small business. Outside the U.S., our competitors tend to be, frankly, whoever the local big money center banks are, and they tend just not to be as focused on that premium consumer segment or the small business segment as we are. And we sort of, to your point, bring our playbook from the U.S. to those markets.

The next thing I’d say is our market shares with the possible exception of maybe the UK are still quite small overseas, as in single digits. And so that is part of what gives us a belief that there is a long, long runway for that to be the fastest-growing part of our business. The next thing I’d say is, look, while in the U.S., our coverage versus a Visa, MasterCard is what we sort of referred to as virtual parity. You’ll occasionally find an exception to that in the U.S., but it’s fairly rare now. Our coverage outside the U.S. is not at virtual parity. But we still have really good results outside the U.S. And we’re adding coverage outside the U.S. at a prodigious rate. So I actually see that as just a source of steady upside. And in fact, one of the reasons that our business outside the U.S. was growing, and I expect in the future to grow faster than the U.S., is because you have this added tailwind of every year we have more places for our Card Members to use the product to meet all of their payment needs. So maybe the last thing I’d say is, while certainly we need to be in every country that we’re allowed to be in around the globe, and we are because when any of you travel out of the U.S., you want to be able to use your card. If you think about, from a financially material perspective, Sanjay, it’s the countries where we also are actively issuing our own cards.

And as you would expect in most businesses there is a much smaller subset of countries, and that wouldn’t surprise anyone, that drive the majority of our economics. So while you can use your card in over 180 countries around the globe, and we have a business in over 180 countries, it’s the UK and Continental Europe, it’s Mexico and Canada, it’s Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, that if you think about the financial materiality of our earnings outside the U.S., it’s those smaller group of generally more affluent countries that drive the business. So we are very upbeat about international. As you would recall, Sanjay, and some of you may realize, we did make an organizational change about the middle of last year, bringing together outside the U.S., our Consumer and Small Business sectors under one leader because we think that’s the right way to accelerate. I would point out, particularly when you’re still small in market shares, there is a lot of overlap between the small business segment and the consumer segment often, when someone is starting a very small business, they start by funding it with their consumer card. And one of the key things you do is at some point, as they grow, you say, we actually have a product that’s tailored to how you’re running your small business. It gives you expanded spending capacity, it gives you a different value proposition of the kind of things that small businesses care about. Those kinds of overlaps are why you need different organizational structures at different times as needs evolve, but we think this will help us further accelerate our growth outside the U.S. in the coming years.

Sanjay Sakhrani

So you talked about the $695. It’s up from – was it $400 something just a little while ago? And you’ve been able to raise the price pretty meaningfully in a short period of time, understanding you hadn’t done it for some time. But I’m just curious how much of a runway you feel you have on pricing going forward?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, a few observations. You all would know from our results that the fastest-growing revenue line we actually have is the card fee revenue, which pre-pandemic was growing double digits, grew every single quarter right through the pandemic, and last quarter it grew 25%. There is a long, long runway. The next thing is, it’s actually not raising the fees that’s driving that growth, it’s actually just bringing new – predominantly, raising fees helps, but the much, much larger portion of that growth is just driven by bringing new customers on to fee products, moving customers from lower fee products. Because remember, yes, to stay with the example of U.S. Consumer, we have the Platinum product at $695, but you also have a Gold product that’s much lower. You have Delta products. You have a Green product that’s lower. There is a ladder for people depending on where they are and their personal financial journey.

The next thing I’d say is I think sometimes people forget that for decades, we have in many, many countries been running the model of every few years, you take a product. You say it’s time to refresh the value proposition of the Platinum card in Mexico and think about for that market – for our key partners for that market, what people value. And so we add value to the product and we raise the fee. So we have history of dozens of examples of what happens when you add some value to the product, some of which we pay for, some of which our partners pay for, raise the fee, how do people behave? So I don’t think we have ever regretted a decision we made to refresh a product and raise the fee, and it gives us a tremendous database of history to rely on for how we believe people will behave as we refresh products and raise the fees.

The last comment I would make is – or maybe two comments. We introduced the U.S. Consumer Platinum Card in 1984. And in 1984, it had a $250 annual fee. If you were to just inflation adjust $250 to today, we’ve actually not even kept up with inflation on the fee. And the other comment I’d make, if you went around the globe, is that the U.S. Consumer Platinum product at $695 is actually on the low end of what we charge in other countries. I often cite the example of Mexico, where in Mexico, the Platinum Card is over $1,000 and it is a great product for us and for our customers. So look, I think one of the unique financial aspects of our model is our ability to generate fee revenue from our Card Members in a way that I don’t think there is any other institution in the world that does. And I think there is a long, long runway for it to continue to be one of our fastest growing revenue lines.

Sanjay Sakhrani

I appreciate that. Maybe we shift gears into B2B because you touched on it a little bit when we were talking about small business, but it just seems like there is a huge opportunity in B2B, not just in card, but in a whole bunch of other areas like enterprise and AP automation, AR automation. Could you just talk about where we are in the journey in these different vectors?

Jeffrey Campbell

So I sometimes start, Sanjay, by being a little careful. Because I think when people use the term B2B, often it’s used in a thousand different ways, and people can kind of talk by each other. For us, our Small Business – small and medium-sized enterprise sector in the U.S. and outside the U.S. is a big chunk of our business. And our card products are used to run people’s business. It’s all B2B, right? So the contractor is getting an American Express Small Business Card because she’s using it to buy all of her supplies and to sort of run the business. The bike shop owner is using it because he’s going to buy his summer inventory of rental bikes for the Jersey Shore in March knowing, well, okay, they won’t bill me for 30 days. I get a no interest loan for another 30 days, it’s working capital. So our entire commercial stake is about B2B. And I would point out that in the U.S., if you look at our card franchise with Small and Midsized enterprises, we are larger than our next four or five competitors combined. So we have a long history of learning how to really cater to the needs of that group.

Now when you think about growth, it is still remarkable. How much of the payment flows between businesses in the U.S. and outside the U.S. are done via checks and ACH which are really inefficient and give you bad data and nobody likes. So there is a vast pool that will become more digitized into more modern forms of payment over the years, but it is slow and steady, Sanjay, right? Because I often point out, I don’t think there is many CEOs of any business that come to work in the morning and say, boy, my number one priority is updating my payments systems, right. Their number one priority is how do I take care of my customers? How do I grow the business? So the evolution happens slowly, but steadily, which, I guess, we view as part of why we have a long history of really good growth in our Small and Midsized enterprise segment, and we have in our view, decades of great growth, as you slowly digitize those payment flows.

Now, there is – I would say from an American Express perspective, there is two big things we are doing to continue to ride the wave and further ride that wave. One is that we are surrounding our small and mid-sized enterprise customers with a broader suite of products. And so during the pandemic, we took advantage of some of the economic dislocations to acquire really the technology piece of the company called Kabbage. They also have a lending business that we did not want or acquire. But we did that because they had a really great suite of technology that if you are running a small business, you can use to manage every part of your small business from the transactional account to forecasting cash flows, to managing your payables and receivables. And really our vision, and we have now re-launched that product because we have to rebrand it, of course as business blueprint. And in our vision that becomes really the front end over time for all of our small and mid-sized enterprise customers in the U.S. Now, we are doing that not because I am going to make a ton of money providing a cash flow forecasting tool or that I am going to make a ton of money on the transaction checking account, not that I am going to lose money doing those. I will get some good funding out of the transaction account, but it’s really about driving more primacy with the customer and ultimately more use of the card. If you just look at profit pools around the globe in the industry, the card profit pools continued to be, in our view the most attractive place to be. And so if you think about our other big initiative here in the commercial, small and mid-sized enterprise space, as you pointed out, it is around AP and AR automation. Because what we have learned is when you can help a business digitize the way it manages in an integrated fashion, all of its payment flows on both the AR and AP side, but in the midst of that, you have a really well integrated card proposition, you suddenly see use of the card go way up. So, we both sell our small and mid-sized enterprise customers, our own AP and AR automation solutions, they can use to manage all their payment flows. They want to use an ACH. They can send an ACH with us. They want to write a check, they can write a check. But when you do that and card is part of the integrated model, they suddenly use the card more too. And of course, we help them understand where and with what merchants they can use the card. We also work with embedding our product in lots of other people who are trying to win in this AP and AR automation space. Because in our view, it’s very fragmented today, and it’s going to remain fragmented. It’s not like there is going to be one dominant provider. So, we have lots of great partners from WEX to Tradeshift to Bill.com where you see the American Express Small Business product integrated into the automation. So, when we go to our customers, we have our own solution. Again, I am not trying to make a gazillion dollars selling automation software. I don’t want to lose money either, but it’s really about broadening the ability of our small to mid-sized enterprise customers to use our products as part of meeting all their payment needs. So, those are all the reasons that we have a long track record of our Small Business segment being one of the strongest growers in the company, and it’s why it’s just a really long runway to continue that.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And the valuations where some of these partners are fintechs and the valuations of these fintechs have come down quite significantly. Does that present an opportunity for you guys to vertically integrate? I mean it would seem like if you own the entire relationship, AP automation and card, it would be preferable, I don’t know if you agree with that?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, so a couple of things. I mean look, we are not overly acquisitive. And if you were to take a 10-year view of our acquisition history, they are all basically capability-oriented acquisitions. On the consumer side, generally around the travel and lifestyle space, acquiring, for example, Resy, or on the commercial side, acquiring companies like acompay or, one we are in the midst of doing now Nipendo, which help us with the AP, AR automation, or Kabbage, which I talked about earlier. But there is nobody out there, Sanjay, we have a very unique business model in the globe, so there is not consolidation piece [ph] for us to do of size. We happen to think when you look across the financial services space, we really like where we play. And so when we look at other areas of financial services, they don’t seem as attractive to us. So, why would I make acquisitions to get into a less attractive space when I have, in our view, a long, long runway to grow in the more attractive spaces that we are in. All that said, we have a very well-established and highly successful venture capital program. At any given time, we have 50, 60 investments in small companies. We do that not because we want to make a lot of money, but we have, we do it really because we are trying to find a way to keep our finger on the pulse of innovation around the globe and around the industry. And look, we think we are pretty good at scale and pretty good at being pretty international and dealing with regulation, and man. There is a lot of great entrepreneurs doing really exciting things in the fintech world. And so when you look at the companies we choose to make modest investments and they are generally always people where we are doing some kind of business partnership as well, helps those companies think about scale and regulation and how to be more global, helps us keep our finger on the pulse. We bought a few of those companies out of the portfolio. So look, you shouldn’t expect any dramatic change. You will see us make an occasional tactical acquisition. And certainly, we are always mindful of valuation and sometimes valuations can be a little high in that sector, I want to be careful. But – and I think the pandemic probably created an example of some dislocation in those values that did allow us, for example, to buy Kabbage.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Cool. So, now I have said the best for last, on like numbers and guidance and stuff like that. So, we got through the big picture stuff, now some quarterly stuff as you indicated. And I think I asked this question on the earnings call, but the mid-teens discount revenue growth, and you alluded to it before, is it pretty high number relative to history. And you seem to think that can continue for some time. Can you just like give – just give us some building blocks for that? I asked the same question, but maybe in a little bit more detail, like why you are so confident that mid-teens is the right number?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, let’s make sure we level set for everyone. So, if you look at the company, the 10 quarters leading up to the pandemic, we grew revenues by clockwork 8% a quarter. And I just used to have an earnings slide, which you would remember I always called it my favorite slide. It was super boring. It was like a straight line across like this at 8%. Then the pandemic hit, but as we went through the pandemic and made a lot of efforts to support our customers, it’s not a lot about our growing every year, growing ability to attract Millennial and Gen Z customers. We also made some very fundamental shifts in the amounts that we are willing to invest in our value proposition, and we made a little bit of a step function change in the amount we spend on marketing. And to remind you, marketing for us is not buying ads at the Super Bowl. Marketing for us is really about the incentives we provide to our customers as they take on new products. And as we looked at all the changes we have made cumulatively over the last 5 years or 6 years, when we looked at the step function change we have made over the last 3 years, and how much we are putting into marketing and the value propositions, we reached the conclusion that the correct aspiration for the company is not to go back to that 8% steady revenue growth we were at pre-pandemic, but to be at a much higher level and in excess of 10% every year on the revenue growth side, with mid-teens EPS growth. So, we laid out that multiyear vision in January of 2022. We also pointed out in 2022, you had all kinds of pandemic tailwinds, which is why you were way above those levels on revenue growth, and even this year. So, we have given guidance for 15% to 17% revenue growth. And while the tailwinds are more modest, look, you did have Omicron as we talked about earlier, at the beginning of 2022. So, that’s going to, from a year-over-year perspective, drive our revenue growth a little bit above steady state levels. And you did have the markets outside the U.S. in 2022 not fully recovered, so that drives you a little bit above. So, 15% to 17% revenue growth is not what you should expect for the next 10 years.

What you should expect for the next 10 years though is a number above 10%. And we feel we are tracking incredibly well with the multiyear vision we first laid out in January 2022. We did much better last year than we expected. Frankly, we did not expect, if you had gone back 13 months to be at 15% to 17% this year up. And all of that is leaving us very confident in our steady-state ambition to be in excess of 10%. And it’s because, Sanjay, we have fundamentally shifted to attracting a younger customer base, which gives you a better growth trajectory because we have now several years of experience with the kind of returns we are generating from our willingness to have increased levels of investments in the value proposition and marketing. And it’s because of the steady coverage gains outside the U.S. that help support particularly high growth rates outside the U.S. And it’s because as we look at the industry, now stepping away from American Express, the premium consumer space is the fastest-growing part of the cards and payments space across the U.S., and we just spent a few minutes talking about the tremendous these growth – strong growth characteristics when you think about small to mid-sized enterprises around the globe.

Sanjay Sakhrani

So, it seems like a lot of the investments you are making give you the comfort you can drive that growth. Is there anything you are worried about the investments you make not being as effective at some point? Like is there something that could go wrong with that, or do you feel like those are pretty iron clad?

Jeffrey Campbell

Well, my job is, the Chief Financial Officer, Sanjay, is to worry about everything. But look, we feel really good about all the things that are in our control. And I am looking – you guys can’t see it, but Sanjay has in front of him here, a piece of paper that we put in our earnings slides for the last couple of years that reminds people when you look at this industry, and I think our public version of this that we did goes back to 2000, so 23 years. And when you think about growth in volumes and payments volume across card rails over that 23-year period, it kind of looks like a straight line. And all of a sudden, yes, the great financial crisis was a little bit of a dislocation. And yes, 9/11, when I was a Chief Financial Officer at American Airlines, was a dislocation. And yes, the pandemic is a dislocation. But if you zoom back, those actually start to look like kind of blips in the long-term trend. And I will anticipate your next question, Sanjay, because the other thing that is different is that we feel by attracting a younger customer base, with the different choices we have made about the level of investment in value propositions and marketing levels that the right sustainable growth rate is higher for us now than it was in those years leading up to the pandemic. And so we feel really good about the long-term trends, and we feel really good about the opportunities.

Sanjay Sakhrani

You anticipated correctly. Well, thank you very much, Jeff, for spending some time with us. I appreciate your support.

Jeffrey Campbell

Sanjay thanks for having us and thanks to all of you.