Christophe Le Caillec
Chief Financial Officer at American Express
Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Given we are at year-end, I will discuss both our Q4 and full-year results. Starting first with our full-year performance, 2024 was a strong year with 10% revenue growth on an FX-adjusted basis and EPS of $14.01, up 25%. And we continue to deliver superior returns-driven by our spend and fee-led model as we ended the year with an ROE of 35%. Notably, we also returned $7.9 billion of capital to shareholders this year, which included the certified gain.
We saw a stable spending environment for most of 2024 with an acceleration in spending as we exited the year. We continue to see healthy loan growth and we achieved record net CAR fees. We achieved these results while maintaining our best-in-class credit performance, investing at high levels for growth as well as driving significant operating leverage. In sum, the building blocks of our financial model are performing well and drive our confidence in the year ahead.
Now taking a closer look at total bill business performance on Slide 3. Robust spending during the holiday period by our premium customer-base helped generate 8% FX-adjusted growth year-over-year in Q4, an uptick from the 6% range we saw for the past few quarters. The increase in growth was broad-based across both T&E and goods and services categories across geographies and across every customer segment as we'll see in a moment. In addition, transaction growth also accelerated to 10% in the quarter, reflecting greater engagement from our card members.
I'll highlight a few key points as we look at spend trends across our businesses over the next few slides. US consumer spend was up 9% year-over-year in the quarter as strong holiday spend drove momentum versus Q3. Growth accelerated in both G&S and T&E categories with performance a bit more concentrated in this strong holiday shopping period compared to the rest of the quarter.
Looking across generations, millennial and Gen Z spend continues to grow faster than the other age cohorts, up 16% in Q4 versus last year. Notably, all generations saw an uptick in spend this quarter compared to Q3. Commercial services spend was up 4% versus last year for the quarter with US SME growing 3%, a bit of an uptick from the past few quarters as organic spend growth improved a bit sequentially. We also saw an increase in spending from our large and global client base with improvement in T&E spend across client industries as well as improvement in goods and services spend.
Lastly, international grew 15% in Q4 versus last year-on an FX-adjusted basis as we continue to make strides in our international business. This rapid growth was visible across spend categories and across our consumer and commercial businesses with each of our top-five markets growing in mid to-high teens. As you can see, Q4 spend results were strong across our businesses and we feel-good about the spend acceleration we saw. While growth in Q1 will be impacted by the grow over from Leap here in 2024, so-far, the first three weeks of January look more in-line with Q4 trends. At the same time, we need to see the momentum will sustain. So as we think about 2025, we are assuming at this point, a similar spend environment to what we saw in 2024 on a full-year basis.
Moving on to loans on Slide 7. Q4 total loans and card member receivables grew at 9% on an FX-adjusted basis versus last year. As a reminder, these growth rates moderated over the course of the year as expected as we lap the period when customers were still building back revolving balances coming out-of-the pandemic. With that process largely behind us, for 2025, we expect loans and receivables growth to continue to grow a bit faster than spend and we continue to meet more -- as we continue to meet more of the borrowing needs of our premium customers.
Turning to Slides 8 and nine, our credit performance continues to be excellent. Delinquency rates and write-off rates are stable versus last quarter and are still below levels from five years ago. Total provision expense was down from a year-ago as we build fewer reserves. These results are an outcome of our premium strategy that attracts high credit quality customers. Combined with our risk management capabilities, this strategy has widened the margin of safety and enjoured profitable growth. We continue to expect some modest upward buyers to write-off and reserve rates over-time as we continue to acquire new customers at elevated levels and increase our share of lending from existing customers.
Turning next to revenues starting on Slide 10. We saw another strong year-over-year revenue growth with revenues up 10% on an FX-adjusted basis for both Q4 and the full-year. Discount revenue grew 8% FX-adjusted in Q4, in-line with billed business growth. Our cycle of product refreshes helped drive card fee growth to 19% FX-adjusted in the quarter and fuel new card acquisition to a record level of $13 million for the new year -- for the year with around 70% of new accounts acquired on fee-paying products. We expect card fee growth in 2025 to continue to grow in the mid to-high teens, but to moderate as we progress through the year.
Turning to Slide 13, Q4 NII was up 13% on an FX-adjusted basis. Growth was driven by increases in revolving loan balances and net yield versus the prior year. As expected, growth moderated this quarter as it has over the course of the year. An important long-term driver of yield is our ability to improve our funding mix as a result of our growing deposits program. Our high-yield savings account balances grew 17% in 2024. As with our premium cards, we see that our product is resonating with younger customers.
Millennial and Gen Z customers make-up over half of the accounts and about a third of the total balances today. As we think about 2025, we expect NII growth to outpace the growth in total loans and receivables, supported by growth in revolving balances. And while there is uncertainty in the rate outlook, as a reminder, we are mildly liability sensitive with a relatively small impact from changes to the Fed funds rate.
I'll turn next to expenses on Slide 15. In Q4, the VCE to revenue ratio was 43%. Rewards expense in particular grew 15% in the 4th-quarter, largely driven by the slow-growth in rewards expense in the prior year. In addition, as we mentioned last quarter, we made some small changes to the program that are good for both customers and the overall economics of the program, but drive a very small increase in the URR in the short-term. Stepping back, we expect overall VCE expenses to grow slightly faster than revenues in 2025 as we continue to invest in our products and drive car member engagement and as our portfolio continues to become more premium.
We expect rewards growth to remain a bit elevated in Q1 as a result of the URL model changes from a year-ago before growing more in-line with the historical trend. We ended the year with $6 billion in marketing expenses, up 16% for the full-year as we invested at elevated levels based on the attractive growth opportunities we saw. Given the significant increase of the investment pool in 2024, we expect a modest increase in marketing expense for 2025. Finally, operating expenses for the quarter were down 1% versus last year at $4.2 billion.
On a full-year basis, operating expenses of $14.6 billion were down 2%. Excluding the gain on-sale of the Asertified business in Q2, operating expenses were up 1% for the full-year. In 2025, we expect operating expenses to grow in low-single digits versus 2024 levels adjusted for the certified gain. This continues our strong record -- track-record of disciplined expense management as we maintain the low levels of growth from last year, while still investing in key areas such as technology. Let me move now to capital on Slide 16. Our Q4 CET1 ratio was 10.5% and continues to be within our 10% to 11% range.
We returned $7.9 billion of capital to our shareholders for the year, including $2 billion of dividends and $5.9 billion of share repurchases. In 2025, we also expect to increase our quarterly dividend by 17% to $0.82 per share, consistent with our approach of growing our dividend in-line with earnings and our 20% to 25% target payout ratio. With this plan increase, we expect to more than double the dividends since the beginning of 2019. We have also reduced the share count by 17%, demonstrating our confidence in the sustainability of earnings of our differentiated model.
This brings me to our 2025 guidance. We continue to run our business with an aspiration to achieve 10% plus revenue growth and mid-teens EPS growth. As Steve noted, for the full-year 2025, we expect revenue growth between 8%, 10% and earnings per share between $15 and $15.50. The EPS range reflects 12% to 16% growth year-over-year adjusted for the certified gain in 2024. I'll note that the revenue guidance reflects the balance between the spend environment we saw for the most of the year and the acceleration in spend growth we saw in Q4. If the spend momentum we saw in Q4 were to continue, we would expect revenue growth to be closer to the high-end of the range, all else equal.
Our guidance also factors in a range of scenarios based on what we are seeing in our business today. It assumes a stable economy and reflects what we know today about the regulatory and competitive environment. At the same time, there is uncertainty in the environment, whether in tax policy, interest rates or currency movements. Our outlook is based on the FX rates as they are today. As a global company, the strengthening of the US dollar is a headwind to our growth. In closing, as you heard, 2024 was a strong year for the company. We are well-positioned to continue our track-record of strong growth in 20 -- into 2025 and we feel-good about the year ahead.
With that, I will now turn the call-back over to Kartik and we will take your questions.
