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loan checks, mortgage checks, official documents of the bank. And the benefits of our program are helping institutions manage their fraud, reduce their cost structure and also the customer service that we provide via the imaging that we do and being able to turn the items around so that they can provide that great customer service. And in certain instances, also for some institutions, our portfolio rate will exceed what they could earn internally and the revenue share that we have creates another benefit for them.
We have relationships with over 1,700 financial institution customers today and that represents about 15,000 branch locations across the United States and about 25% of the FI institutions in the US
The other float-based product that we have is our money order product and that is offered through retail and financial institutions. It's over 65,000 locations in the US and this represents approximately 20,000 agent relationships.
We also have a sale of receivables facility, which Bill manages, and this is a vehicle that we use to accelerate our cash float associated with the receivables from the money order product. One of the things that we're very excited about is the future of this footprint and these 20,000 unique relationships that we have between the financial institutions and the US retailers offering our money order products and the potential that we have for cross-selling money transfer, urgent bill payment, walk-in bill payment and other new products as we move forward.
I want to give you a little background on the official check life cycle and what that looks like. These instruments tend to live about 3 to 5 days. It is -- comprises about 80% of our portfolio. They tend to be shorter in nature than a money order due to the type of instrument that they are. They're higher dollar in value, used to close on homes and the like and so they clear in about a 3 to 5 day period of time. What we have here is a transaction flow that you can see in the blue and then kind of a fund flow in the red. Just so you understand kind of the dynamic and how that product works.
Day Zero as an official check issued, would start the transaction flow and then the first day, the funds would actually be remitted from the financial institution to us via primarily wire, so most of those funds we receive within one business day. And the next two to three days is spent through the life side, or the banking channels, and in terms of that instrument then making its way from the use to when the item is cleared. And then we're investing the funds during that period of time and on Day four or five, we're actually settling with the processing bank and it completes the cycle. It's important to note that obviously, we're sharing a portion of that revenue stream then back with the financial institution, so there is a commission sharing associated with that product.
Next, money orders. These items tend to live about seven to nine days. They comprise about 20% of our investment portfolio. Again if you look at the life cycle, Day Zero, when the money is -- the money order is issued. The next day, the agents would be remitting the funds to us typically. We would receive the funds Day one or two via wire or ACH. In some selected instances, like in the check cashing segment, some of those remittance schedules are delayed beyond the one to two days because of the nature of the business. For the most part, in Day two to seven, it's either in the consumer's hands or it's in the mail in order to pay a bill. During that period of time, Bill's investing the funds and then Day seven through nine, on average, the item is actually being presented to the bank and then we are settling that. And on this particular product, we do not share -- are not sharing any of the investment component back with the entities that we do business.
If you look at the life cycle there's many steps and many places that we add value from an official check and a money order perspective. The issue, capturing and transmitting the item, we do a lot from an imaging standpoint after the check is deposited and the capture of that. We do all, the reconcilement. We archive, we do the customer service. Again, imaging comes into play here in terms of being able to get that document back to customers if they need it. And then finally is [sheeting] the funds back to the States, as necessary, and so there's a lot of steps, a lot of value that we're adding in that process and just give you a little overall view of what that flow looks like.
And then we'll talk about just the portfolio a bit just in terms of the investment revenue side of the equation here and as you can see from this chart, we have been very successful in driving away from our revenue stream from investment revenue and our dependence on that, that's more of a fee revenue approach. In 2006, we are at about 34% investment revenue of the total and you can see in the red there, our total revenue growth. A lot of that has been driven by fee-based money transfer product. It's also been driven by our urgent bill payment product and the growth that we've had there. And then also repricing the official check product and getting a fee component into that revenue stream and we've been very successful with that. So as you go back to 2002, about 50% of our revenue stream at that time was investment revenue. That's been reduced to 34%.
And with that, I will turn it over to Bill to talk about the portfolio and then I'll come back up to talk a little bit about our long-term strategy.
BILL PUTNEY, EVP, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, MONEYGRAM INTERNATIONAL: As you can see, I mean this is a chart that we've shown over the years, you can see we -- where balances have really gone over the period of time. '03 was really the peak of the refinancing cycle. For the last few years obviously we've seen consolidation in the bank market as well as mortgage activity, auto finance activity has actually been down during that period of time. So, balances have really bottomed out, now we're right around that 6.3 billion mark as we've seen things decline.
Here's the asset allocation of the portfolio. Again, not much of a change. If you were here last year, it's virtually identical to the same chart. Again, very heavily invested in the residential mortgage market, CMVS, Munis, asset backs, other. Again, this chart hasn't changed much over the years. Again, when you're purchasing A or better credit rated assets, there's only so many places you can go. This is a portfolio that you'll probably see, whether you show up next year or the following year, it's going to look very identical.
Portfolio quality, I'll get into a moment the regulatory environment we deal with, but as you know, we have to invest A or better on the regulatory items that we invest the float on behalf of the items. Again, the bulk of the portfolio's in AA or better type investments. We have some A. We do have an allocation up to 3% in non-investment grade portfolio instruments in there as well. But as you can see, the -- by policy, we try to manage to a AA rating.
The duration of the portfolio, again, this is on an asset duration basis. And then at the bottom, we actually show you the net duration, which is very important. As Tony put up there, we have a commission sharing arrangement with the banks, so we really are spread investors at the end of the day, so the net duration plays the most important part for the portfolio as far as the risk sensitivity to changes [abrates]. But as you can see, it's a fairly short duration portfolio, we've managed through this short duration for a number of years and as you can see, we've been around this 1.5 year duration now for the last few years. And I know things that are on people's mind all the time it's a flat yield curve environment, that's one of the reasons. When the curve's this flat, it doesn't really pay for us to be extending duration dramatically in this market.
Hedging strategies, I know it's near and dear to all of your hearts, how you watch our derivatives portfolio fluctuate over time. We use various sorts of mechanisms to manage our interest rate sensitivity exposure. We have exposure to the prime linked product as well as the sale of receivables to changes of interest rates. And how we manage that, obviously, we've used interest rate derivatives where we will effectively pay a fixed rate and receive a floating rate or we'll hedge out our fixed coupon in the investment portfolio to neutralize any changes to interest rates. We use cash and other floating rate products. And as you've seen the decline in balances over the years, the last few years, we've actually used more floating rate and cash product as well during that period of time. So you've seen a -- more of a dramatic loss in the derivatives portfolios as far as the hedge balances. And I know it's a question Tim gets quite often is why are you using fewer derivatives? We really look for the most efficient means to hedge the portfolio. And over the last year or so, really the cash product and floating rate product has been a much more efficient means for us to hedge.
Regulatory oversight, I'm looking for Tom Haider, who's -- this is near and dear to Tom's heart. We're required to maintain a 1 to 1 relationship for those money orders and those prime link official checks out in the system. On a market value basis, we have to maintain a A- or A3 or better rating on all those investments to comply with the regulatory environment that we're dealing within. And of course, we have to file detailed permissible investment reports on a quarterly basis. When I say detailed, they literally get a line item by line item view of the portfolio.
A couple of portfolio highlights, again we have a 1% name limit in the portfolio. The maximum, obviously, we can carry is $60 million currently in the portfolio. And that name I mentioned before, we have a non-investment grade portion of the portfolio, it's up to 3% of the total balances of the portfolio. Again, we have multi-faceted portfolio oversight. It comes not only from the Board level, at the Finance and the Investment Committee. We have an ALCO Committee with several executives as well as our friends at the state regulatory bodies.
Tony?
TONY RYAN: I've just got a couple of slides on strategy here and then Bill and I will finish it up with the summary and then we'll jump into our other products and services.
If you take a look at really our growth strategy for the financial institutions segment, it really is comprised of two parts. The first part is to continue to grow the official check business and I think for everybody who's been following us, you've seen the fee-based component that we've added in, we're going to continue that focus and making sure that we hit our target margins and we're introducing a good fee component in each one of our deals. We've had a lot of discipline around the pricing and as part of that discipline, we are looking this year to selectively add balances that meet those target thresholds and we were stepping up those activities as we headed into the year. Obviously with the FDC's announcement of pulling out of this business, we think that there may be more potential for us, but again we're going to have discipline around that and maintain our target approach to how we bring those balances on.
What we're also excited about then, is really the future of our new products and services and what we can deliver through those relationships and really products and services that we see, first and foremost, that we can drive into the FI channel would be money transfer, urgent bill payment and then ACH services like web-based transactions, web-based ACH transactions and telephone-based transactions as well. So I think that our platform and our history with all of these customers and having penetration into 25% of the institutions set us up well for new products and services.
Our money order strategy is to maintain our number one position and also have the transaction run-off that we're experiencing in a declining market be less than what the market is declining overall. Our estimates are that the market is declining about 7 to 10% on an annual basis and we are the number one provider and we've outperformed that the last couple of years and that's the goal to do that. This remains a very high margin product for us. Very strong cash flows and it's been good for us to take the cash flow from this business and plug it into our money transfer expansion and also new products such as bill payment and then some of the product enhancement on money transfer like e-Money Transfer and Directed Sends, which we'll talk about in a moment.
And with that, I'll have Bill come up again and we will summarize the float products.
BILL PUTNEY: At the end of the day, I mean really we've shown this slide in the past and it continues to really be the portfolio strategy. It's providing that liquidity for the payment obligations. Obviously, as Tony put up that slide, you can see that there's a very short duration of that product. They come in the door one day, they're cashed a few days down the road, they clear out through the system. So our goal is really to provide liquidity for those check items.
Protect the principal, obviously that's near and dear to our hearts as well and obviously, when you're investing in A or better assets, even though it goes without saying, that is our number one goal at the end of the day.
And to generate long-term attractive returns. And what does this mean? At the end of the day, it's to try to stabilize that net interest margin through various environments. You may have a few bumps in the road here or there within quarters, but at the end of the day, it's really longer term over a year or two-cycle that we're looking at, at the end of the day.
TONY RYAN: And then just to summarize, the goal here is to leverage that asset, leverage those -- the distribution channel and cross sell some of the product that we're going to move into next.
So with that, we're going to talk about the remainder of the products underneath the Global Payment Services umbrella and what I'd like to start with here is consumer-to-consumer money transfer is offered on a worldwide basis, as Bill said, we're in 170 countries. These bars really represent the time element of the different facets of that product offering. It is a 10-minute service, as you can see by that red bar. It's will-call service, meaning that you can pick up that transaction at any location in the country that you specify. We offer service now through 110,000 agent locations and as Phil said, that's up 24% over the prior year.
As part of that offering, people also have on a real-time basis, the capability of picking up a currency of their choice in 90 countries. We continue to expand our multi-currency capability in our platform and driving that out in the markets and as you see in the upcoming slide, we intend to do that throughout 2007, we have more countries to go.
This really gives the consumer a choice of local currency or euro or dollar pay out where appropriate and if you think about people living in Rumania, as an example, if they're coming from the euro zone, they probably want to have to have euro delivered to them. If they're in the United States, it's probably clearer to understand the transaction if it is paid out in US dollars. So we can have countries that are paying out more than one currency based on that consumer's choice.
Directed Sends is another feature where we are taking the actual send transaction then directing that to a specific place that the recipient wants it to go. That could be directly to a bank account, it could be delivered to a physical home address or it could be put onto a prepaid debit card. The reason that bar is longer is this is typically going to be a three day or so delivery in terms of that transaction because it takes awhile to move through the banking channels. That's another option for our customers.
The other part of the business is the consumer-to-business products and that is really led by ExpressPayment. These services today are only offered in the United States. ExpressPayment is our urgent bill payment product. You get immediate good funds if you're the biller and you also get real-time reporting capability and those are really the two highlights for the program.
We have a tremendous asset in that we have 1,800 biller relationships, many of which we have direct connections or we reach through our payment tracker reporting tool, where they can upload and -- information from that system into their accounts receivable and other processing systems. So it's a great asset for us.
We also launched in November of 2006 our InPerson, our walk-in bill payments offering. This is used for utilities, rent and other payments. And you see that bar's a little bit longer as opposed to an immediate service. That is going to be typically about three to five days on the posting time.
And money orders, a little longer bar there. Obviously our paper-based product offering and as we said earlier, seven to nine days used for the same types of things that our InPerson Bill Payment offering is used for, the same types of payments.
And then finally, our pre-paid debit card, which we started offering last year. And you take a look at that product and it's used at merchant locations, it's also used at ATMs to get funds directly and it can be reloaded through any of our US money transfer locations and the platforms that we have there.
We're excited about the InPerson Bill Payment product offering because the natural target of that is the extension of our 55,000 retail money order locations and trying to drive that activity into those same relationships.
That's a bit of the overview of the products. Now we're going to jump into money transfer and look at that more specifically.
We've had great success in terms of growing the network and in 2002, we had about 57,000 locations. By the end of '06, 110,000 locations. If you start with 2001 as really being the base year on that equation, it's a compounded annual growth rate of about 17%. We've nearly doubled the size of our network from 2002 to 2006 and as we've said, our stated goal is to grow that network 15 to 20% a year and in 2006 we did a bit better, obviously, growing at 24%. So we're proud of our expansion.
The next slide will really highlight where that has occurred. The two top blocks on this chart are send markets or primarily send markets. The United States and Canada is in the red that has grown from about 19,000 locations to 29,000 locations over that 4-year period of time. In the blue would be Western Europe and the Middle East, again, primarily send markets for the most part, 20,000 locations to 31,000 locations. And then the remaining four boxes would be again, primarily be receive markets and as you can see we've experienced good growth in each of those. Probably the leading box there would be Asia Pacific, the Indian sub-continent and Africa where we experienced growth from 6,000 locations to 22,000 locations. So we continue the worldwide march of expanding that network and you can see that we've grown in each of the major regional areas that we talked about.
The next slide talks about some of the global partners that we have and it's a great mix between major retailers, major financial institutions and also post offices and really the combination of those. And just to throw out a few highlights here, we obviously offer our three major products through all the Wal-Mart locations in the United States. We also have a relationship with Wal-Mart in Mexico and Puerto Rico. As Phil mentioned, we re-signed SUPERVALU that bought the Albertsons locations within the US to a long-term deal. We are inside the ACE Check Cashing locations, which is the largest check casher inside the United States. We do business with Gigante, a major retailer in Mexico and Carrefour, a major retailer in Europe. And our actual print there with Carrefour is in Spain.
Some of the financial institutions we do business with would include Bancomer in Mexico, Banco Itau in Brazil, Bank Pekao in Poland, BCR in Rumania, ICBC in China and the United Bank for Africa and Nigeria.
And the post offices that we have that are listed on this chart would be the post office in the United Kingdom, the Accounting Post Office, the Canadian Post Office, the Philippines Post Office. So I think it gives you an idea of the breadth of the coverage and the types of entities that we're doing business with and as we continue to grow and put new relationships on top of that, like Giant Eagle and Shaw's, we continue to expand that footprint worldwide and add to our distribution.
Distribution has led to very strong transaction growth. You can see that we have experienced now 22 consecutive quarters, over 25% growth. Out of the last 5 years, our best growth rates have been in the last 3 and in descending order. So 2006 was our best growth rate at 41%, followed by '05 and '04 at 38 and 36 respectively.
In addition to network growth, the things that we think are propelling that transaction volume is going to be the simplified pricing that we did in the United States, which I'll talk about in a moment. The expansion of our currency conversions, getting the right price and the right currency to the consumer. And then really marketing and telling them about that value. The signs and the targeted marketing efforts and we'll go into a little bit more detail about that in a moment.
The transaction growth is translating nicely into market share. In 2002, we had 1.6% share based on our calculations. We use Ipay, as many do, as the source. We've done some very comprehensive research on the size of the market. The estimate is that it's about $269 billion as of last year and we would have about 4% of that share as of 2006. And as Phil mentioned, Western Union's reporting that they have 17% share, which would mean the two biggest players in the market have less than 25% of the overall market. So, plenty of room for growth.
Mexico gets a lot of attention and Mexico remains a very important market for us, but I think context is important, looking at the impact to the overall business. And if you take a look at where we were back in 2000, Mexico represented about one in four transactions if you include consumer money transfer and our urgent bill payment product in those totals with everything running through our money transfer program.
By 2006, that actually diminished to 11%. But the thing that is interesting about that is we increased our market share. So I think that it shows that we've increased our share during that period of time, but we've become less reliant on Mexico. And I think that's really reflective of the fact that we've experience growth around the world and we've experienced growth in the majority of our corridors. We believe that Mexico has been affected by immigration issues, as Phil said. We have increased border patrols, we have the Arizona issue. We have a number of things that have been going on just in the States wading into proposed legislation as it impacts immigration and also the stronger economy in Mexico. So I think if you take a look at the first quarter, we would think that we're going to trend a little bit more back to the Banco de Mexico statistics and on the next slide I'll show you how we have performance against that.
We've actually outperformed, over the last four quarters, very nicely here and that line that says Banco de Mexico on it, we really represent 100% or the index itself. So we, in the first quarter, are about 1.7 times the growth rate of what was reported by the Central Bank of Mexico and by the fourth quarter we are at 2.8 times. So again, we've increased our share during this period of time and we've outperformed and we like Mexico. And a lot of that growth has been driven by Wal-Mart. It's been driven by competitive take-aways like Nicks Check Cashing and as you know network growth can be a little bit choppy, so we would see that probably in the first quarter we would trend a little bit more along the lines of what the Banco de Mexico statistics would look like. Our strategy in Mexico continues to be to grow our network in the US, grow our network in Mexico and expand our footprint,