And we’ve been able to, in a given market, make better trade-off decisions from an investment perspective because we’re running it much more as a market as opposed to running it as global segments. And I think that’s really giving the team a lot more flexibility and giving them a lot more ability to achieve their goals. So – and look, the reality is international is the fastest-growing part of our business pre-pandemic. And this was – these moves were made to become more efficient to get it back to where it was and go beyond that. And so we feel good about the start that international is on at the moment.Jeff Campbell Yes. The only comment I’d add, Mark, is it is remarkable the breadth of the strength right now when you look across geographies.
It’s Europe, it’s the UK, it’s where we are in Latin America, it’s Asia. It’s really broad-based. So, we feel really good about the progress.Operator Thank you. The next question is coming from Betsy Graseck of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.Betsy Graseck Hi good morning.Steve Squeri Good morning, Betsy.Betsy Graseck Hi, I did want to just ask an overarching question on top-line growth drivers from here. And I know we have already spoken about a couple of different line items. I think U.S. and large corporate is still something we could unpack a little bit. But I would also like if you could just, from your vantage point, give us where you think the growth drivers are from here, which 1Q extremely strong? Thanks.Jeff Campbell Well, many senses [ph] Betsy, I would almost just point you to the first quarter results, because I think one of the drivers of our confidence is the breadth of strength we see across all the lines of the P&L.
So discount revenues, when you look forward and look at growth, are going to look about like they did this quarter. I think you’ll see a tail-down slightly, because you have a little bit of Omicron tailwind maybe in January and February. But volumes look good, and that’s going to continue to be a nice double-digit driver of growth.We have grown net card fees in double digits consistently for year’s right through every single quarter of the pandemic, and they’ve been above 20% for the last couple of quarters. That’s going to continue, because what we constantly have to remind people of is it’s not particularly increases in fees for any given card to drive that, although it helps. It’s mostly the steady acquisition that Steve talked about; more people are on higher fee-paying cards.Net interest income, as I said, I think our overall loan balance growth will probably continue to be higher than it was pre-pandemic, but moderate a bit as our customer’s kind of get through the process of rebuilding balances.
I think – I don’t want to pretend to suggest I can predict exactly what interest rates through the rest of the year. That will have some impact on the growth rate. Although I’d remind you, unlike most banks, we’re – the impact of rates moving one way or another on us is very, very modest. We’re reasonably hedged. There’s a 10-K disclosure about that for anyone who’s interested, but we’re not that heavily impacted.And then you have the service fee and other revenue line, which is benefiting from travel-related strength. And I think that will continue. So, I think as you think about the drivers of revenue growth across the rest of the year, it doesn’t look that different than what you saw in the first quarter. It’s very broad-based, and that’s what gives us confidence.Steve Squeri Yes.
So, I could just say what he said. But let me just take it up a level. And I think that one of the things that we do in looking for opportunities is we try and make sure we’re investing in those opportunities, which have the greatest return. And Jeff said this many, many times on these calls, we have more good opportunities to invest in than we have dollars to invest. And I think nothing is a better example of how good our opportunities – how much better our opportunities have been come than what I – and how I answered the first question for Sanjay in talking about how the cards that we’re acquiring now are 50% in this first quarter, anyway, 50% better than they were back in 2018.And the other thing that I would say, which I think is really important is when we looked at acquiring a customer and we report cards, but we look at acquiring revenue and when we look at a customer, revenue for us is a three-legged stool.
We acquire card members and a majority 70% of the cards we’re acquiring right now are paying fees. That’s a huge differentiator for us. Then what we do, you pay that fee, you use the product and then as Jeff said, that discount revenue and at discount revenue is going to grow pretty much in line with where it was now.And then the third legged stool is interest income. And we’ve modified our products so that we have planted on it, we have pay over time, and so we’re giving our customers lots and lots of choices in how they want to manage their financial lives with us and how they want to manage their credit card payments. And so we really focus a lot on revenue for our customers. And that’s what gives us a lot of – that’s what gives us a lot of confidence because when we acquire a customer it’s not, okay, we’re going to acquire [indiscernible] going to drive lending revenue.
We’re going to acquire this customer, and it’s going to be fee. We literally look at that entire basket and as we look at the ROIs, all of that is taken into account.Operator Thank you. The next question is coming from Rick Shane of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.Rick Shane Thanks guys for taking my question this morning. I’d like to discuss the accounting and strategy on fee waivers. When fees are waived, I’m assuming that the fees are recognized and there’s an offsetting expense in terms of marketing. Are both the fees and expenses accreted in amortized quarterly? Is that the way we should think about it?Jeff Campbell Well, I think, can I maybe step back, Rick? So when you, because in many ways I think sometimes there’s a misnomer about when we have a line called marketing what’s actually in the marketing line, right?
So there are variety of incentives that we offer to customers and sometimes to partners acquire customers that are involved in bringing new card members into the franchise. And when you look at the $5.5 billion that we spend in marketing, there’s a very small portion of that that is – ads that probably people talk about more. But the overwhelming majority of what’s in that $5.5 million are the costs of the many kinds of incentives that we offer to customers. And so fee waivers can be incentive or interest rates on balances that are at promotional levels, but in general the cost of those welcome incentives are going to be amortized over varying periods, right?We offer lots of different kinds of marketing incentives, so I can’t generalize to the exact period, but generally they’re going to be amortized over a period.
So one of the things we always wrestle with is when you look at it in total, as you’re bringing more customers into the franchise, you generally are recognizing the cost of bringing them in more quickly than they’re spending and their revenues ramp-up. And so like many companies, you sometimes have the good problem that the more you bring new customers in, which is a good thing for the long-term. In the short run that can create a little bit of a economic headwind. So that’s the way I would think about this.Operator Thank you. The next question is coming from Craig Maurer of FT Partners. Please go ahead.Craig Maurer Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking question.Steve Squeri Good morning, Craig.Jeff Campbell Hey, welcome back.Craig Maurer Thanks.
It’s been fun getting the business up and running for FT Partners. And again, I appreciate you taking the question. So with thinking about credit, if we look at what drove the provisioning expense in the quarter, it looks like the allowance build was actually materially less than it was in fourth quarter despite the relatively similar provisioning – provision amount. So it seems like you were soaking up the losses that were driven by the rise in delinquent season in the back half of last year, but you only saw a very small increase in delinquencies in the quarter. So I guess the question is, are you comfortable with where allowance levels are now especially considering they’re materially higher than where they were going into the pandemic?Steve Squeri Well, let me, can I work backwards?
I think the simple way because this is such a complex subject as you know, Craig that I always encourage people to think about this, is take the reserves on the balance sheet divided by the total loans and receivables. That ratio is 2.5% at the end of this quarter compare that number to what was day-one CECL, it was 2.9%. You can compare that same number to every other financial institution that reports, and I think that’s a simple way to both track us versus history and us versus other companies. And as you know, our 2.5% is by a long shot best-in-class relative to what others have. When you think about sequential CECL accounting, what I would say is the fourth quarter of last year was probably one of the last quarter’s that’s still what I will refer to as pandemic CECL noise.In other words, all of the financial institutions built all these big reserves, released them at different times for us, and I think this is different from any other institutions; we’re kind of past that.
And so what you see starting in the first quarter, not in the fourth quarter of last year, is really not influenced by all the noise that the pandemic drove as we all built and then released reserves. It’s why in some ways I think going forward from here you’re back to, I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a BAU view of CECL accounting because none of us have done CECL accounting in a normal world. But for us we’re sort of back at a fairly steady state run rate. So if you think about it, we expect loan balances to continue to build. We expect credit metrics to continue to moderate up a little bit and that will cause us to continue to build a little bit of reserve each quarter, and all of that is built into the guidance that we’re referring today.Operator Thank you.
The next question is coming from Dominick Gabriele of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.Dominick Gabriele Hey guys, good morning.Steve Squeri Good morning.Dominick Gabriele Thank you so much for taking my questions. So I know a lot of the business obviously depends on the consumer, but you do have a very large unique commercial business. And so if you think about the bank tightening, some belief will occur, how do you think this plays out through your large and FMB businesses if credit – access to credit changes? And how do you think those Domino’s kind of fall in affecting their spending levels or whatever you think are the key elements there? That’d be great to hear your perspective. Thanks so much.Steve Squeri Well, I think, let’s look at – look at – let’s look at how much it represents, right?
Large and global accounts represent about 6% of our overall spending and not so sure when you look at that segment that sort of credit spend – credit tightening is really going to drive their spending. That is predominantly a T&E – a T&E game. And most companies are trying to get their people out and trying to get them to go out and travel and that spending has been up 34%. We’re still not back to where we were. What normally affects that for us is more layoffs and things like that, but even in the face of layoffs especially the tech segment or late starts that are going to occur in consulting and things like that, I think if we’re in a unique situation right now where I just don’t think credit tightening in that segment is really going to be – is really going to be an issue.I think there it’s going to be more of a – of an earning story.
And do they do layoffs? But again we’re in such a crazy spot where most people aren’t traveling anyway and people are encouraging to travel; I don’t see that. I think when you look at small businesses – small businesses go in and out quite a bit and you could see with some credit tightening some small businesses having harder access to some – to some working capital. What I would say is one of the things that that we do have from a small business perspective is we are really with our launch of Blueprint and Kabbage and so forth. We have working capital loans, we have short-term loans, and so forth and we’re not in the same position as a lot of these other smaller banks are.And so for those credit worthy small businesses we will continue to extend credit and it could be an opportunity for us actually, provided to credit is, the credit is good.
So I think in general it can affect the small business economy and our ability maybe to grow, to get working capital. But I think it also provides us with an opportunity because we may not be the lender of first resort to these small business right now, and I think it could be an opportunity for us again judiciously, but an opportunity.Operator Thank you. The next question is coming from Moshe Orenbuch of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.Moshe Orenbuch Great, thanks. Jeff, you had talked a little bit about the OpEx being kind of flattish over the course of the year, I think, I mean, historically that had kind of been seasonally low in the beginning of the year and seasonally high at the end. Is there something that’s changed with respect to that?Jeff Campbell Yes.
