“Taking everything into account, we now expect our full year operating expenses to be around $13 billion, as we invest in our talented colleague base, technology and other key underpinnings of our growth given our tremendously high levels of revenue growth.”

In context

“inging in to American Express membership, which continue to look strong relative to what we saw pre-pandemic. I would now expect to spend a little over $5 billion on marketing in 2022. Moving to the bottom of Slide 17 brings us to operating expenses, which were $3.3 billion in the second quarter. There's often some quarterly volatility in this number due to the varied timing of certain accruals and entries. This quarter, for example, we see the impact of the prior year including a sizable benefit from net mark-to-market gains in our Amex Ventures strategic investment portfolio. As I said last quarter, and as Steve discussed earlier, inflation, while driving some modest positive impact on volumes, it's also putting pressure on our operating expenses, particularly in our compensation costs. Taking everything into account, we now expect our full year operating expenses to be around $13 billion, as we invest in our talented colleague base, technology and other key underpinnings of our growth given our tremendously high levels of revenue growth. Turning next to capital on Slide 18. We returned $1 billion of capital to our shareholders in the second quarter, including common stock repurchases of $611 million and $394 million in common stock dividends on the back of strong earnings generation. Our CET1 ratio was 10.3% at the end of the second quarter, within our target range of 10% to 11%. We plan to continue to return to shareholders the excess capital we generate while supporting our balance sheet growth. Given the concerns about the macro economy and the market, it is worth noting that in the Fed's CCAR stress test results released last month, American Express was again one of the few firms that remained cumulatively profitable under the Fed's macroeconomic stress scenario and we had the highest profit margin as a percentage of”