“We now expect marketing expenses to grow in the mid-single digits for the full year.”

In context

“unts and about 1/3 of the balances. Looking ahead, we expect NII growth to continue to outpace growth in balances for the year. Turning to expenses. The VC to revenue ratio was 44.7% this quarter, in line with our expectations. There is some quarterly variability in the ratio given seasonality. For the full year, we continue to expect the VCE to revenue ratio to be lower than Q1, around 44%. The step-up versus the first half of last year reflects the investment we made in the value proposition of our U.S. Platinum cards when we refreshed these products last year. Marketing spend was $1.5 billion this quarter, flat to last year. Given the strong performance we saw in Q1 and our confidence in the balance of the year, we plan to increase our marketing investments to support long-term growth. We now expect marketing expenses to grow in the mid-single digits for the full year. Moving on to capital. We returned $2.3 billion of capital to our shareholders including $0.7 billion of dividends and $1.7 billion of share repurchases. We continue to deliver very strong returns with an ROE of 35% this quarter. Our strong ROE enables us to return high levels of earnings to our shareholders around 75% over the past 3 years. And this quarter, we increased our dividend by 16%, demonstrating our confidence in the sustainability of earnings generated by our model. As we think about our capital requirements, we view the recent Basel proposals as an improvement from the prior proposal. Under the rules as proposed today, we expect the impact of capital requirements to range from neutral to modestly positive. As we evaluate the proposal in the CapEx or other regulatory considerat”