“We expect earnings growth to be more muted in the second half of the year due primarily to less benefit from interest income on customer balances, normalization in transaction and loan loss performance as we progress through the year and the expected timing of investment actions.”

In context

“nue to plan for a relatively consistent macroeconomic and consumer spending environment. With respect to earnings per share, we now expect 2024 non-GAAP EPS to grow by a mid- to high single-digit percentage. As Alex said earlier, we are in a transition year, and we do not expect that our quarterly progression will be linear. To help bridge this outlook compared to our prior guidance for approximately flat non-GAAP EPS, there are 2 main factors I would point you to. First, our inclusion of stock-based compensation expense within non-GAAP results is expected to benefit EPS growth by approximately 3 percentage points this year. Second, we saw meaningful outperformance in the first quarter relative to our plans. We intend to reinvest a portion of this performance back into the business. We expect earnings growth to be more muted in the second half of the year due primarily to less benefit from interest income on customer balances, normalization in transaction and loan loss performance as we progress through the year and the expected timing of investment actions. Underpinning our outlook, we now expect transaction margin dollars to be slightly positive for the full year. We expect non-transaction operating expenses to increase slightly. Embedded within this outlook is the flexibility to make key strategic decisions to invest and reinvigorate profitable growth within components of the portfolio and accelerate go-to-market efforts. For the full year, we expect other value-added services revenue to be roughly flat year-over-year. This excludes any potential impact from the CFPB late fee regulation, given pending litigation across the banking industry and uncertainty on both timing and implementation. As a company, we have already taken steps to mitigate the future impact, though these take time to fully take hold. Consistent with the approach w”