Today's discussion will begin with David Yowan, Executive President and Corporate Treasurer, who wil

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Follow-up Second airline flight track Quarter 2012 Earnings Release airline flight track Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Vivian Zhou.
Thank you. Welcome, we appreciate airline flight track all of you joining us for today's discussion. The discussion today contain certain forward-looking statements about the company's future financial performance and business prospects, which are subject to risks and uncertainties airline flight track and speak only as of today. The words believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, optimistic, airline flight track intend, plan, aim, will, should, could, likely and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
Factors airline flight track that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including the company's financial airline flight track and other goals, are set forth within yesterday's earnings press release and earnings supplement, which are filed in an 8-K report and in the company's 2011 10-K and first quarter 2012 Form 10-Q report, already on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the second quarter 2012 fixed income presentation slides, which are now posted on our website at ir.americanexpress.com, we have provided information that describes certain non-GAAP financial measures used by the company and the comparable GAAP financial information. We encourage you to review that information in conjunction airline flight track with today's discussion.
Today's discussion will begin with David Yowan, Executive President and Corporate Treasurer, who will provide a second quarter 2012 capital and funding update, including some key points related to the quarter's financial performance through the series of slides distributed and provide some brief summary comment. Once Dave completes airline flight track his remarks, we will move to Q&A.
Thanks, Vivian. We're pleased to host this Fixed Income Investor Conference Call this quarter. We hope you'll find informative and helpful a separate discussion that focuses on elements of our business that are of particular interest to fixed income investors. As always, we appreciate any feedback you have on how we can best provide you with the information you need to make investment decisions.
Today, we're going to provide you with a capital airline flight track and funding and liquidity management update. Some of you may have joined us on our earnings call yesterday, and there are some key points from that call that I would like to reemphasize. Then I'll take you through some specifics on our capital position and liquidity profile.
Turning to Slide 2. We report our second quarter results, which included a 5% increase in total revenues net of interest expense on an FX-adjusted basis that was 7%. In the call yesterday, you saw how the stronger dollar airline flight track has had an impact on some of our key metrics.
airline flight track Income from continuing operations increased 3%, while diluted EPS from continuing ops increased 7%. That faster growth of EPS relative to income is a consequence of the share repurchase activity that we've conducted. And you can see at the bottom of this slide, you see the average diluted shares outstanding have declined 4% over this period.
If you turn to Slide 3, we describe some of the key metric performance for the quarter. Billed business at $221 billion was up 7% compared to the prior quarter last year and 9% on an FX-adjusted basis. That billed business growth was driven by a 6% increase in total cards in force. There was a little faster growth in that in the GNS business and a growth of -- in the issuance of proprietary cards was a little slower than that.
Turning to Slides 4 and 5. These are slides that we use to describe how the billed business metric turns into loans and assets on our balance sheet. Slide 4 shows on the solid line the change, year-over-year change, percentage change in billed business on our charge card products across consumer, small business and corporate card. The dotted line shows the change in ending receivables associated airline flight track with that spending. And as you would expect, given the pay-in-full nature of the product, the relationship between those 2 lines is very strong.
If you turn to Slide 5, here, we show the growth in spending on our credit card products airline flight track as well as the growth in loans as well. So again, the solid line is the year-over-year change in proprietary credit card billed business. The dotted line is the year-over-year growth in ending loans on a managed basis.
While spending growth has slowed somewhat, you'll see that loan growth, which had been quite negative airline flight track in the period from -- in '09 and '10, was positive and there is a convergence between spending growth airline flight track and loan growth airline flight track here.
Slide 6 puts our spending and loan balances into a competitive framework. This is data for the first half of the year based on results reported to date. Our total billed business of $433 billion is well above all the other major issuers, and you can see the growth rates on a year-over-year basis compared to prior year at the bottom of that graph on the left-hand side.
Starting on Slide 7, we describe the credit performance in our charge and credit card portfolios. Slide 7 gives you a sense of the write-off airline flight track rates in our charge card portfolios. The left-hand side is U.S. consumer and small business charge card, where our 2% write-off rate is above the 1.5% rate from a year ago, but down on a sequential airline flight track basis from 2.3%.
Here, the metric -- the loss metric is shown as a percentage of billed business. But you could see a similar pattern to the write-off rates in the U.S. consumer segment. So write-offs are slightly airline flight track higher than a year ago, but have declined on a sequential basis.
Turning to Slide 8. We show the write-off rates, including leading competitor write-off rates as well. Our second quarter write-off rate was 2.2%. That's down from 3.1% a year ago and down sequentially as well. If you look at our monthly disclosures in the second quarter, our write-off rate in the second quarter released in April was 2.4%. It was 2.2% in May, and then it ended the quarter, exited the quarter in June, at a 2% rate to average out to 2.2%.
Page 9 shows a similar pattern in delinquency rates. Again, this is on our lending business. The delinquency rate in the second quarter at 1.3% is down from 1.6% a year ago as well as shows a decline on a sequential basis. These credit metrics are at historically low levels for our company.
Slide 10 describes the credit quality, as disclosed in the FICO scores, in our 2 securitization trusts and compared to the FICO distributions as disclosed in the most recently available information from the other major card trusts. You'll see on the left-hand side, that gives you a percentage of our 2 trusts, the AXP charge trust, the Credit Account Master Trust -- I'm sorry, that's the American airline flight track Express Issuance Trust, and then the lending trust is the Credit Master Trust, the percentage of those accounts and balances that have a FICO below 660.
On Slide 11, we turn to our capital airline flight track ratios. We ended the second quarter with a Tier 1 common risk-based ratio of 12.8%. Not on the page, but you remember that we ended last year, 2011, at 12.3% on this metric. Then in the first quarter, the ratio increased 110 basis points to 13.4%. It increased because we had a limited amount of share buyback activity in the first quarter as we only received the approval from the Fed to our capital distribution plan late into the first quarter.
In the second quarter, we accelerated and increased the amount of shares that we repurchased. We repurchased 1.8 billion of shares in the second quarter, bringing the first half of the year amount to $2 billion. That share buyback amount helped influence and drive the decrease in our Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio down to 12.8% at the end of the quarter.
We've also disclosed that the impact of the proposed rules on Basel III that were released in June would have, on a pro forma basis, reduced our Tier 1 common risk-based ratio by roughly 30 basis points. That compares to some of the prior quarters where I think the range that we've disclosed on net impact is somewhere between 20 and 80 basis points, so still within the range that we have disclosed historically, given the release of the proposed rules.
Turning to Slide 12, we just review our principal objectives and strategies for funding and liquidity. We continue to maintain a target to hold, I should say, sufficient cash and readily airline flight track marketable securities to meet all of our maturing funding obligations airline flight track for the next 12 months. And that's in case we don't have access to the unsecured or secured airline flight track debt capital markets or are able to raise additional airline flight track deposit funds.
Our strategy with respect to funding is to continue to focus on diversifying our funding sources between deposits, unsecured debt and ABS. We're focused airline flight track on laddering out our maturities to avoid any large concentrations of maturities in any onetime period or with any one particular funding source and to continue to maintain substantial levels of cash and readily marketable securities as well as additional contingent funding sources, such as bank lines, conduit airline flight track facilities and discount window.
Page 13 gives you our snapshot of liquidity against that strategy and target that I just talked about. We had excess cash and securities on the left-hand side of the page of $16 billion. That's after deducting our commercial paper outstanding of less than $1 billion. We compare that to the funding maturities we have of $15 billion over the next 12-month period. You might remember at the end of the first quarter, our excess cash was $20 billion versus 12-month maturity of $17 billion.
Turning to Slide 14, we give you the balances and a roll-forward of our 3 major deposit programs. We ended the quarter with a little less than $36 billion of retail deposits across our 3 deposit programs. Our direct program, branded as Personal Savings from American Express, ended the quarter wi