Mastercard Incorporated (MA) KBW Fintech Payments Conference (Transcript)

Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) KBW Fintech Payments Conference Call February 28, 2023 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Sachin Mehra - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Sanjay Sakhrani - KBW

Sanjay Sakhrani

Let’s get started here. Next up, we have Sachin Mehra, who is joining us for the second year in a row from Mastercard. Sachin has been the CFO of Mastercard since early 2019, and he’s been with the company for nearly 13 years. It’s a long time. We’re excited to have him for a fireside chat today. And so please join me in welcoming Sachin.

So maybe we can talk about the top of mind topic for everyone, which is the economy, right? I think everyone is kind of wondering in which direction we’re going to go. I’m curious if you have a perspective based on what you’re seeing broadly?

Sachin Mehra

Sure. Good morning, everyone and Sanjay, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. And it’s nice to be back again. I think last year, we had the Mandarin, and this seems like a nice venue as well. So thank you for having me.

On your question as it relates to what’s going on in the economy. Look, I mean, we continue to see what is a remarkably resilient consumer. Consumer spending remains strong. We’ve shown – we’ve talked about this as part of our Q4 earnings call in January, and you’ve seen the metrics as they stand through not only Q4, but the first 3 weeks of January as well. And the consumer continues to be resilient, and it’s one of the things which we are closely tracking is what is the strength of the labor market as part of this process.

And we all know that the labor market, certainly in the U.S. but in various other parts of the globe is actually holding up pretty nicely, record low unemployment rates. And when people are employed, they generate paychecks, when they generate paychecks, they tend to spend money, and that’s what we’ve been seeing thus far. So but that’s one which we keep a close eye on because at the end of the day, that’s going to be an influencing factor as to how the consumer health shapes up as the year progresses.

Obviously, inflation has been something which we’ve been all living with. We’ve seen some level of moderation take place in terms of inflation, although it still remains at fairly elevated levels. A quick reminder. Our business model continues to be a nominal spend business model, which is the combination of real spending and inflation. So you see the effects of that come through in terms of how consumer spending is showing up.

The other point I kind of just make is, as it relates to what we’re seeing from a cross-border standpoint because certainly, I’ve given you kind of broad color on where we’re seeing the consumer, but from a cross-border standpoint, we’re very encouraged with what we’ve seen in terms of how cross-borders recovered coming out of COVID. And inbound cross-border travel, right, in January, all regions were above the pre-COVID level. So you were seeing a fairly good recovery, which took place from a cross-border travel standpoint. I would say where we are right now is that in most regions, we’ve reached that level where there’s a level of stability. So you’re not seeing accelerating growth take place in terms of cross-border. There’s stability, healthy growth rates, but not accelerating growth rates.

The one area of opportunity continues to be Asia Pacific. We talked about this a little bit at the earnings call. We’ve got markets like Japan, which opened up late coming out of COVID. So there’s some potential, which remains there. And then, of course, there’s China, it’s still early days as it relates to China, but that’s what we’re seeing there.

My last comment is, in terms of where we are from a consumer health standpoint, I would say that what we’re seeing through the first 3 weeks of February is generally a continuation in terms of the strength in consumer spending come through.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Sanjay Sakhrani

Great. And I guess on your earnings call, you gave guidance for the first quarter as well as the full year. How does the macro play into those assumptions as it relates to your top line forecast? And how is the company set up if conditions change?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. Sure. Look, I mean, the macro is an important part, right? Our top line is influenced by personal consumption expenditure, which is what the consumer is doing from a spending standpoint. Our base case assumption, as we’ve kind of shared with you at the earnings call is that we’re continuing to assume that the consumer remains resilient as the year progresses. So it’s – that’s kind of how we’re thinking about it. Obviously, our growth is influenced by numerous factors. I mean there’s certainly the macro environment which plays a part. It’s what the secular trends look like, how we’re doing from a market share standpoint matters.

And then, of course, over the past decade, we’ve invested heavily as a company in diversifying our revenue streams across multiple kind of ways in order to provide greater resilience when macro environments kind of tend to slow down. So we feel pretty good in terms of what the building blocks are from a macro standpoint – sorry, from an overall growth standpoint, but the macro is a big factor.

And as it relates to your question as to how you handle what might be a macro slowdown, Look, I go back to the fact that we have a well-diversified business model, which holds us in good stead, immune to macro slowdowns. Of course, we will feel the impact of that. But we’ve demonstrated in the past and we’ll continue to show in the future that we have a business model where we can demonstrate a fair amount of flexibility from a cost and an expense-based standpoint, where we keep a very close eye to how the top line is shaping up and then make sure we’re actually managing from an expense standpoint to ensure that we’re being in sync with what we’re seeing from a top line standpoint.

I will say we shouldn’t think about this as a quarter-over-quarter exercise. We’re looking and have always looked to actually deliver positive operating leverage as a company over the long term. That is our philosophy. That will continue to be our philosophy. We will continue to invest in strategic imperatives. But if there were a slowdown to take place in the top line, we do have levers in our cost base where you can pull back without necessarily impacting long-term growth.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And like how are you strategically planning that? I mean I would assume your base case is, things are pretty stable from a macro standpoint. And then you’re minding where you can cut costs? Or how should we just think about positioning?

Sachin Mehra

And this is not a – my response is not a this-year response. Every year, as part of our budget planning cycle, what we do is we have what is our base case. We do a downside planning scenario and then we do an upside planning scenario. And this is not just an academic exercise, which we as a company do, where someone in the center kind of decides, okay, we’re going to pull this lever from a cost standpoint.

We’re working with our business units, to have them really think through in a fair amount of detail. If revenues were to get impacted by x percent, what would you do from an expense standpoint without impairing our ability to grow over the long term. So we’ve got fairly detailed plans as to where the cost levers exist in the business for us to actually act both on the upside and the downside. So we try to maintain that discipline every year as part of our annual budget planning process with our business units as being the executors of that.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Got it. Maybe shifting gears to some of the strategic wins that you’ve had recently. I mean I think Citizens was a big win. How are you guys winning in this competitive backdrop? And then maybe you can help us with the sequencing of when these relationships roll on?

Sachin Mehra

Sure. So look, first, I’d say we’re incredibly pleased with the win we’ve had with Citizens. Citizens has always been a very important partner for Mastercard. We’ve been working with them for some time on their commercial business as well as certain elements of their consumer business.

Going forward, Citizens will work exclusively with Mastercard as their payments provider for debit, credit, commercial and consumer, that is kind of what the scope of the agreement is for those people who haven’t had the chance to listen to the announcement.

Why are we winning? I mean Citizens is one example of wins. We’ve had many other wins that I can talk about what those look like. But the reality is it’s all about making sure that we have an approach to our customers to try and understand – what is it that we can do to help them grow their top line and manage their expense base. The dialogue is quite different than just showing up and saying, I want to be your payment network provider. It’s about making sure we share common values, common vision, common mission in terms of how we’re going about doing this.

So in the instance Citizen, I would tell you, we have a shared vision and values with them, and that’s around providing access, innovating and driving inclusion in the communities in which we serve.

Mastercard stands for that, as the Citizens, we have common values as it relates to that, and we bring a set of assets which help them get there. So specifically for Citizens, the assets which were very appealing for them to make the decision they did were around our digital capabilities, our open banking capabilities to provide access to those consumers, which I was just talking about. And then everything we’re doing from a safety and security standpoint.

Now again, different customers have different parts of what they want to achieve and how we bring our assets to bear on that matters to them. But it’s really about just stepping back and saying, we’re not just a vendor, we’re just not the network provider. We are the ones who can help you grow your top line and manage your expense base. And by the way, in your expense base, you have a line items in your expense base such as fraud, which are far bigger from an impact standpoint than what our network cost could be. So let us help you with the assets we can bring and be a strategic partner.

And that’s been very helpful, whether it’s Citizens or some of the other wins we’ve had like Santander and NatWest, Deutsche Bank. It doesn’t really matter. I mean you can go across a whole range of them. In fact, Gap, which was a co-brand program with the competition for more than a decade, they moved over to Mastercard because of their relationship with Mastercard, where they were buying services from Mastercard, our test and learn capabilities for many years, and they saw the value we were bringing to them beyond just what the co-brand program might mean.

In terms of how these things will roll on, I would tell you, Citizens, we have an existing business with Citizens, which is going to carry on. As it relates to the debit program, which will be the conversion, which will take place over to Mastercard, that’s mostly a 2024 event. It will be a phased migration, which will take place. And not necessarily upon expiration of the cards, but it will be phased. It’s not going to be like a one-stop kind of done deal, and they’re still working the details of all of that out. And then on the other migrations, which we’ve had in terms of the wins for Deutsche Bank, there’s good work going on.

We expect for that migration to start sometime in the middle of this year. And Santander is something which we’ve been working on and – we’re pretty far along in that migration. That should be something which should be complete by Q1 of this year. And then NatWest again, is pretty far along in the process as well.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Okay. Great. Could we just go back to cross-border, the points you made on cross-border and China actually. Just – I know it’s not material right now, but what do you think the timing is of seeing some follow-through from some of the easing in China?

Sachin Mehra

Yes, you know what, Sanjay, that’s anybody’s guess, to be honest with you. It’s just so hard to predict how – there are so many factors at play, right? There’s certainly the lifting of COVID restrictions, which kind of so called have been lifted. But lifting of COVID restrictions doesn’t make people comfortable to say, now I’m going to go in and travel, right? It’s about getting that level of comfort to say, I can go in and travel just the way I used to in the past, and that’s anybody’s guess as to when people get comfortable with that.

The other thing to remember is, there’s a geopolitical environment, which is fairly uncertain. There’s every day, every week, there’s new news as it relates to the relationship between the U.S. and China. That has an impact, and people care about that. So I think – I guess our guess is as good as your guess as it relates to how that will play out. We’ve obviously built in some level of recovery as the year kind of goes on in terms of how we’re thinking about the year for 2023, but it’s hard to really predict some certainty around that.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Clear. So you recently filed an 8-K highlighting changes to the way you report net revenues. Maybe you could just talk about sort of what prompted this and give us an overview?

Sachin Mehra

Sure. So first, I’m going to – I don’t know how many of you have had the opportunity to listen in to the call we had as it relates to the 8-K, which Sanjay was just talking about. But really, what that is, is a revised presentation of our revenue footnote in our 10-K, our 10-Q, so on and so forth, right?

This is the disaggregation of our revenues and how we’re presenting them on a going-forward basis. Nothing is changing fundamentally in terms of how we’re running the business, what the strategy of the company is, how we operate on a day-to-day basis. This is about providing more transparency, better aligning what we’re showing you in terms of disaggregation of revenues, with what our strategic priorities are and also better aligning with recent interpretive guidance, which is out there.

So there’s a combination of things which precipitated it. We were at 10-K time, we thought it’s the right thing to do, and that’s what we’ve done. And really the summary of what we’ve done there is, if you take a look at our footnote, which is our revenue footnote, you will now see that we are breaking up our – or disaggregating our revenue by what we call payment network revenue and value-added services and solutions revenue. Both of these are being shown on a net revenue basis. In addition to these two types of revenue or disaggregation that we are showing we will be providing key operating metrics in our MD&A. And the key operating metrics are our domestic assessments, our cross-border assessments, transaction processing assessments and other network assessments. This is important because that gives you visibility as to how those assessments are shaping up relative to the drivers. That’s how we manage the business. That’s how you would like to track it, we believe. We will also provide you visibility on the rebates and incentives that we are paying in our payment network. And that will be something which we present as part of our MD&A.

Just at the very highest level, what you are seeing in payment network revenue is revenues related to our card operations. That’s what’s there, just at the highest level, that’s what you’ve got. In value-added services and solutions, you’ve got our revenues related to our cyber and intelligence capabilities, our data and services capabilities, processing and gateway, our ACH, both batch and real-time and other ACH-related solutions, digital identity and open banking. So that’s the combination of things. It’s providing that visibility as to how much revenue on a net revenue basis is being generated from each one of these disaggregated revenue sources.

Sanjay Sakhrani

I think what was apparent, obviously, is the value-added services. It’s a significant portion of the business today compared to maybe 10 years ago. And I’m just curious, if you could talk about the strategy here. Obviously, it’s been key to winning some of the new relationships. But how do your services compare to the competition?

Sachin Mehra

Sure. So first, I want to just be clear, what Sanjay just talked about was value-added services, which is a subset of value-added services and solutions. But I want to get to your specific point on value-added services because that is the lion’s share of what sits in value-added services and solutions. Look, I mean, you’ve just got to step back in time to think about why we got into the space in the first place. We’re not the largest operator, and it’s no secret, we’re not the largest operator in the payment space. Our path into value-added services and solutions was driven by a few key considerations. One was, we wanted to generate a set of capabilities, which would be accretive to revenue growth at a pace faster than what the core payment network was growing at. So this was around driving revenue at a faster pace. It was around diversifying our revenue sources. And last but not the least, it was about providing us a set of tools, which would allow us to differentiate ourselves from our customer.

So where does that differentiation come from? Because that’s the heart of the question you’re asking, how are you differentiated from the customer? Well, you differentiate it from the customer in – at two levels. One is how you integrate these value-added services and solutions into what you do from a payment standpoint matters because this is not about thinking about value-added services and solutions as a standalone. They are very tightly integrated into what we do from a payments network standpoint. But at the heart of it, it all comes down to the data we have, how that data is organized, how it’s structured. It’s one thing to have data, but disorganized data is not helpful. It’s not helpful for us from a C&I standpoint, which is cyber intelligence standpoint. It’s not helpful for us from a data and services and data insights and analytics standpoint.

So how, one, having access to data; two, how you organize that data; three, what kind of technology you apply to that and the expertise you have in the nature of human capital. It’s a combination of all of that. When you can bring that to bear and tightly integrate it with what we’re doing from a payment standpoint is how we differentiate ourselves there. So often, winning in this space is about being able to actually drive value for the payment side of the business, without necessarily creating separate and bespoke implementations for the customer. So when you can embed at the network level, you allow yourself the flexibility to allow your customer to be able to seamlessly benefit from a lot of these capabilities.

And so I’ll go back to – you asked a question about Citizens and how we won there or some of those wins. The reality is, when you go and you talk to your customer and you tell your customer, if you’re looking to grow your top line, we have some deep insights in terms of what can help you grow your top line. That comes back from our Data Insights and Analytics. That’s how we distinguish ourselves. Then after that, it comes to, by the way, we can do your managed services campaign, which is we can help you generate more card origination through some of the work which we deliver through our data and services capabilities. We can also help you with reducing one of your big cost elements, which is fraud as part of that. So when you bring all of that together and now with our open banking capabilities, that’s another set of capabilities, which is helping us, which sits in this value-added services and solutions, and that’s how we differentiate.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And inside of value-added services, where do you think the biggest opportunity is for, maybe not exponential growth, but faster, than what we’ve seen thus far?

Sachin Mehra

So I would say we have reached decent scale, and I’m never going to be satisfied with the scale, so I say decent scale on cyber and intelligence and data and services, but I continue to believe there is significant amounts of growth opportunity, which remains there. But I think about what’s going on from an open banking and a digital identity standpoint, which is in our new networks pillar, it’s very early days. It’s fast growing. It’s growing at a rapid pace, but given the size of the opportunity, that’s incredibly early days out there. So if I would just sit back and I would have think about it, things which are going to matter to the bottom line in the here and now continue to be around cyber and intelligence and data and services, just because of the fact that they are at scale and they are growing at a rapid pace, and there is a decent TAM to go after. But if I think about the medium and long-term, I’ve got a lot of good, positive hope for digital identity and for open banking as being what maybe Cyber Intelligence and Data and services were a decade ago.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And maybe on that open banking topic, you recently announced the Pay by Bank solution with JPMorgan. I’m just curious if you could share more about this product? And how this fits into the overall strategy there?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. Again, this is one more area where we’re super excited with not only the solution but the recognition of what the value this solution can provide to a very important customer to Mastercard, JPMorgan in this instance, right? So as I think about it at the highest level, this is an expansion of our total addressable market. What we’re going after is bill payments, which are done on ACH rails. Just to be clear, let’s stop there. What is the problem we’re solving? Today, in a market like the U.S., there is a capability known as eCheck, which is when people use an eCheck facility to make bill payments. The problem with eCheck is – it works, and it works really well, but it’s got opportunities for improvement of the consumer experience as well as the biller experience. And this is where our open banking rails come into play, specifically by accessing our open banking rails what we’re able to provide to the consumer is the ability to authenticate themselves, leveraging their bank app credentials, right, so that they do not need to remember what the routing number for their bank account is nor their actual bank account number to authenticate themselves. So you will use your same credentials as you do normally in your bank app to authenticate yourself and be able to make payments and initiate payments for bills which are presented there.

On the biller side, the presentment part is a seamless experience, which is taking place. But what we are doing is building on these open banking rails and have already built on these open banking rails, what we call a Payment Success Indicator. So one of the big problems in the bill payment space is what we call Not Sufficient Funds, which is when people initiate a bill payment, but they don’t have the funds in their account. This is incredibly expensive for the biller, but it’s also expensive for the consumer. Our Payment Success Indicator application, which we built on top of the open banking rails effectively has real-time visibility into – with consumer consent. This is all with consumer consent. Has visibility into what the cash inflows and outflows are in the consumer’s account so that leveraging again the data that we’ve got, we can actually provide a predictive score to the biller to say, if you were to do an ACH full at this point in time, here is the confidence with which you should be able to get that money versus not get that money. So it reduces the potential for not sufficient funds, which is an expensive proposition for the biller and for the consumer. So that’s kind of the solution here. Again, it’s about getting into a space where we don’t today do stuff from a card standpoint but bringing value. And from sitting in my chair, the economics are attractive. I like the economics of what I see out here, and we’re bringing real value.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And how do those economics flow?

Sachin Mehra

It’s what you charge basically the biller as part of...

Sanjay Sakhrani

The biller.

Sachin Mehra

Yes, that’s right...

Sanjay Sakhrani

And that makes sense because you’re adding value to the biller who can make a determination there. And I guess when we think about this solution and other use cases, Will there be other use cases with JPMorgan? And maybe we think about how broad this can be exposed to other banks on your platform?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. So look, I mean, I think there is no reason why other banks who are in the bill payment space, who enable bill payments should not and cannot be leveraging this. I will say this is leveraging the acquisition of Finicity, which we did in 2020. It’s a U.S.-based acquisition. So for now, a lot of the focus around the solution is around deeply penetrating bill payers and bill presenters in the U.S. environment, but we stand ready to do that for not only JPMorgan Chase but others as well. So that’s kind of part one. That doesn’t mean it’s not something we can do in Europe. But – it’s all about prioritization. It’s about making sure we’re kind of driving where we’ve got solutions, where we can actually start to monetize them on a real-time basis, right? As it relates to your question about being able to leverage your open banking rails or our open banking rails to do more, well, the basic premise with which we bought Finicity in the first place was around what they were doing from a credit decisioning and a credit scoring standpoint. And that still continues to generate revenue, there still remains an opportunity.

One which comes to mind for me is, one of the big pain points which exist globally is the small business universe has a hard time gaining access to credit. Part of the reason they have a hard time gaining access to credit is there is a lack of transparency as to what a small business owner has in the nature of cash inflows and outflows taking place from their account. So when they go to get credit from a financial institution, if the financial institution doesn’t happen to be the financial institution where they are banking, right, they have a hard time providing visibility as to what the velocity of flows in and out are with open banking. With the small business owners’ permission, you can provide some really good insights from an application standpoint as to what kind of credit score you could assign for that. So we can see lots of opportunities around this space. I think this is all about making sure we’re going after multiple areas, but leveraging the network effect of what open banking doesn’t. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

Sanjay Sakhrani

That’s great. Maybe we shift gears and move into payments. We were talking about this in an earlier session, but EWS’ announcement to create a new payment button. I’m curious how you think it impacts Mastercard? Obviously, we also have Click to Pay. I don’t know where that stands. Maybe you can just update us on that as well?

Sachin Mehra

Absolutely. So first, I’ll say, we are pleased to see that EWS is launching this digital wallet solution and that it’s going to leverage the card network capabilities that we’ve got. So that’s definitely a positive. Our engagement with EWS as well as the banks involved with EWS is quite positive. We continue to engage with them on acceptance and interoperability, which is important, right, has also around two other areas, one around security, which is a very important consideration for them and what we can bring in terms of our security assets to them. And then thirdly is around the consumer experience. So certainly, good engagement there.

As it relates to your question on Click to Pay, we continue to believe that Click to Pay will peacefully coexist with other digital wallet operators. In fact, if you think about what EWS is doing is basically an endorsement of what we are doing with Click to Pay, which is about creating a brand-agnostic wallet capability to address the guest checkout experience. And we’re making good strides on that. We’ve started to actually really build out our capabilities from acceptance footprint standpoint. We are now live with Click to Pay in 20 markets globally. And we continue to strike partnerships – in the last earnings call, we talked about our partnership with Adyen where we’re working with them to have our Click to Pay capability embedded into their platforms to allow for greater proliferation for the merchants they sell. So we kind of see them coexisting and we’re happy to be part of the solution. Remember, at the heart of what we at Mastercard do is we’re in the business of providing choice, right? We can’t force people to do it in one way and one way only. We want to provide optionality, and we want to be part of those optionality solutions, independent of whether you go with Click to Pay or EWS or whatever the solution might be going forward.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Got it. I guess maybe we could talk about disbursement and remittance flows, the progress you’ve made thus far. Maybe you could just go through that?

Sachin Mehra

Sure. So just for the benefit of everyone, we’ve defined remittances and disbursements as one of the four legs of the stool in our new payment flows strategy. So we have remittances and disbursements. We have what we call commercial point-of-sale. We have virtual cards and B2B accounts payable, and then the fourth element is around bill payments. And I’ll try and address a lot of these. So first, the TAM or the addressable market that we see in remittance and disbursements is fairly sizable. And that is $30 trillion plus, as we had said on our Investor Day in 2021. We continue to make very good progress. We are seeing healthy growth take place with our capabilities around the space. And if you just step back and you think about what makes us successful in this space, it’s a few things. It’s around diversification of your customer base, both FI and non-FI, right. It’s around developing new use cases, which we are actively going after, but it’s also about increasing the number of end points where you can actually terminate the payment when it’s a remittance or a disbursement. And on that last piece, we are running at close to 10 billion endpoints where we can terminate payments from our remittance and disbursement standpoint. So, that’s really important because at the end of the day, ubiquity of how you can get the money into people’s hands matters. Otherwise, that solution doesn’t work in the two-sided market. It’s really about making sure we continue to do what we are doing, which is in a very methodical way, market-by-market, penetrating our customer base and going after these new use cases, and we continue to grow that pretty nicely. And then I think about some of the other areas, I know you asked only about remittances and disbursements, but I think it’s important to talk about some of the other new payment flow areas such as commercial point of sale, which is a $14 trillion TAM as we size it. And again, this is all back to our Investor Day from 2021. We are showing very good growth in that space. I mean you may have picked up in our 10-K that we grew last year in commercial, which is a combination of commercial point-of-sale in virtual cards. We grew about 24% on a local currency basis, and now commercial represents roughly 13% of our total GDV. So, it’s a business which is growing nicely. We are seeing good traction. The value prop is well understood by the market. There is a significant amount of non-addressed flows, which we can go after, which we are working hard on. And this again is everything from our SME proposition to our T&E proposition to purchasing cards, fleet cards, virtual cards, which by the way, in virtual cards, we are the global leader there. So, it’s actually an exciting space for and one to watch out for as we go forward.

Sanjay Sakhrani

And like when we think about the growth rate of commercial, maybe for the next 5 years to 10 years, I mean is it going to be higher than consumer, or like how should we think about that’s – like a goalpost for that?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. Look, I mean I think the potential for commercial is fairly significant as I see it. It’s both because there is a need in the market which is unmet as well as we have a set of capabilities, which go well beyond just the card network capabilities that we have got. It’s things like the investments we made in smart data. It’s the – smart data is our – our expense management solution, which is brought together with the T&E proposition to enable for a stronger sale in T&E, right. It’s things like our virtual card capability. So, the short answer is we should be growing at a very healthy clip as far as commercial capabilities goes going forward.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Cool. So, if you were here last year, as you were, crypto was the hot topic. Fast forward a year from now, not as much. So, I am just curious what sort of Mastercard’s view is a revised view, if there is one, on digital currencies. And maybe has anything changed in terms of how you were thinking about the opportunity?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. So, I think it’s important to actually anchor back to how we thought about digital currencies, or for that matter, buy now, pay later or for a lot of these new things which kind of have come and gone in cycles in terms of the intensity level with which people are focused on them. We go back to our principles. And as it relates to digital currencies, the principles which we have actually anchored around are, you have got to make sure that you have got appropriate consumer protection for it. You have got to make sure that there is stability in the currency, right. And that you are meeting all regulatory obligations, which go along with that. And in many instances that we are coming to realize, the regulatory framework is still developing. It hasn’t been fully developed. So, our view on this is the underlying technology, which is the blockchain technology or the digital ledger technology, which exists is something we still see a lot of good potential use cases for and we continue to invest in that space to build out those use cases. Specifically, as it relates to crypto, we have a role to play there as well. And the role we play respecting our principles around what we call the on-ramp and the off-ramp, which is enabling the purchase of crypto as well as the utilization of crypto with the assets we have got, it’s around delivering services. So for example, we acquired a company called CipherTrace. CipherTrace is all about identifying fraud and compliance-related issues which exist in the crypto universe, and being preventative in that space, something our customers care deeply about, but regulators care equally deeply about. So, we think there is value to be added there as well as it relates to the delivering of services, which we are doing there. And then while we are doing all of that, it’s also getting our network ready for what might be the future of digital currencies, which have that stability principle to be able to settle over our network. So again, the bottom line is these things will kind of ebb and flow in terms of what the level of vigor is what – with which people go after it. Our view is, let’s get the right regulatory framework in place. Let’s protect the consumer. Let’s make sure it’s got stability and be part of the solution there.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Great. And maybe staying on that regulatory theme, obviously, there is a decent amount of regulatory activity here in the United States. Maybe you could just comment on the settlement with the FTC and the Fed’s amended rule related to online debit. Beyond that, I tend to think about the nationalism aspect of all of this. We were talking a lot about it before pandemic. I just worried with the war and all this other stuff that it becomes even a bigger topic. So, maybe you could just even address that as well, so two-sided question on regulation.

Sachin Mehra

Sure. Yes. Look, I mean the settlement which we have reached with the FTC is something which was kind of the right thing to do. We continue to maintain that our activities as it relates to how we were doing our routing were lawful. And that’s really what we have done. As part of the settlement, what we have agreed for is to make available the PAN associated with a Mastercard token when presented as part of an e-commerce transaction or a card-not-present debit transaction. That’s kind of what we have done there. As it relates to the Fed regulation, which is to be implemented by the middle of this year, look, the issuers have to work on enabling that in the card-not-present environment. We view that as just a clarification of what was put in place about a decade ago. Our network will be ready to support that. We stand to be in good shape as it relates to not only implementing that, but also competing in the marketplace for what would be our fair share of volumes as part of that process, no different than what we did back when the Durbin Amendment first came into play in 2011, 2012. On your broader question around trends from a nationalism standpoint, I mean for those people who are interested in MasterCard, you should be interested in what the nationalistic tendencies are around the world because that’s something we have lived with for the longest time. And if anything, the nationalistic fervor has only gone up post Russia, because I think as you could well imagine, there are countries who are sitting and saying, what will happen to us if a similar kind of situation as Russia played out, which has got nothing to do with Mastercard per se, but it’s got everything to do with the political environment, which we are operating in. This is where being a global company, but acting locally is going to be incredibly important, which has been the focus for Mastercard for a long, long time. And acting locally comes across multiple dimensions. It’s around everything from having a team, which is a local team. And that’s what we have got in a lot of the countries we have got. You have got to stop there. Number two, you have got to meet and come up with local solutions to make them relevant. You have got to understand what the ultimate mandate, which the government is trying to actually achieve is and bring your solutions to bear there. So for example, part of going down the multi-rail strategy path was to be able to engage on multiple levels with local regulators to provide payment solutions which go well beyond guardrails. So, that would be part of kind of the playbook, or for that matter, part of our admin into growing our services capabilities is there will be markets where the local regulator will say, you know what, I want this to be national infrastructure and payments will be something which we will control and we will manage and we will switch. But, we are not going to walk away from that. We are going to actually be value-added service providers in those kind of instances. No different, by the way. If I were just kind of talking back to what we have been doing for the better part of three decades, Mastercard does not switch all the transactions, which are Mastercard branded. In other words, there are domestic schemes in many markets across the globe where the switching of the transaction takes place on a local network. That is a form of nationalism. We have been living with this for many, many decades. We have found ways to actually participate in those flows, whether it’s cross-border, delivering services, and that will be the playbook going forward as well.

Sanjay Sakhrani

That makes sense. I guess maybe one broad question, then I will open it up to the audience. What do you think are the key long-term opportunities for Mastercard? It sounds like one of them is value-added services and all the things that you talked about, right? But inside of payments, maybe you could – you can talk about it?

Sachin Mehra

I think Sanjay, that’s a really good question. Because oftentimes, when we talk about opportunities, we tend to migrate to what’s the new and cool and different stuff. And I think that’s super important for us to keep an eye on and invest in for things which will pay off in the future. But we have some really rich assets which are there in payments, which we continue to believe there is a lot of promise on. So, I am going to name a few, just – take something as basic as building out our acceptance footprint and what we can do. The more we can do to build out our acceptance footprint, the better we are going to be and the stronger we are going to be as a card network. We continue to remain focused on that. It’s bringing our digital technologies to bear. And when I was talking about acceptance, think about something like app on phone, enabling every phone device to become an acceptance device just creates a multiplier effect in terms of how you can grow your acceptance footprint. So acceptance, leveraging our digital capabilities, going after new payment flows, super important areas as far as we are concerned, beyond everything on services and new networks. These are important places for us to actually focus.

Sanjay Sakhrani

Okay. Great. So, why don’t we see if we have any questions in the room and then…

Sachin Mehra

There is one right here.

Sanjay Sakhrani

There is one right up here. Hold on a second.

Unidentified Analyst

How much your Central Bank payment systems are threat to Mastercard, you may remind like AgriGold [ph] in Nigeria, PIX in Brazil, MIR maybe in Russia isn’t relevant anymore, but there are a number of Central Banks who are regulators, who have unlimited resources and are launching payment systems, which in some cases, a retail, P2P, B2B. How do you worry about that?

Sachin Mehra

Yes. We kind of – the starting point is to take a lens of saying, let’s not get complacent with the solution we have got and that being the only right solution. We have got a mindset which kind of goes in with that – on that basis, recognizing that if there is a central bank or a local government which wants to do something in a particular way, they are going to do it in that way. So, then you kind of double click and get to the next level as to where we can drive the opportunity in that flow, right. So for example, let’s take Russia, because Russia was a prime example after the Crimea invasion took place, where they mandated for a local payment network to be put in place, correct. We could have resisted and said, okay, well, you do it on your own, we are out, right. What do we choose to do, we chose to say, no, no, no, we are not going to get out of this. We are going to help you set up your local payment network. We are going to help deliver value-added services. And by the way, while we are doing all of that, we can also help you with your cross-border flows. And why is that important, because if you think about it, fast forward from the time when that local network was stood up to when we exited or suspended our operations in Russia, we had talked last year about how Russia represented approximately 4% of our revenue. So, we had grown that revenue base pretty significantly on the back of what was the local network at that point in time. And so there is a different playbook depending on the market in question and that...

Unidentified Analyst

In the case of Brazil, it’s more directly – I mean your – there is not an obvious opportunity for you to help them. And they are the regulator and they have – I mean they are growing gangbusters…

Sachin Mehra

Yes. So, you are alluding to or you are talking specifically about PIX in this instance. In this instance of Brazil – first, I think it’s important to actually understand what is the value prop, what needed serving. And in this instance, primarily going after P2P flows, going after Boleto flows, which are flows, which were non-card in the first place. That does not mean that there isn’t a proliferation which will take place potentially in P2M flows to some small extent. But then it’s important to actually step back and think about the value prop that a debit card proposition provides versus what PIX provides. So, in the debit card proposition, you have got zero liability, you have got chargeback rules and dispute resolution, stuff you don’t have with PIX. So, there will be some flows which will potentially migrate where the value of chargebacks and the value of zero liability is not there. But there will be many flows where a consumer will care deeply about what we provide as a card network where we feel like we can actually not only compete with them, but then also help bring value to help upgrade their system in that regard.

Sanjay Sakhrani

So sorry, we are going to have to stop right there. We are out of time. Thank you so much, Sachin. I appreciate it.

Sachin Mehra

Thanks Sanjay. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.