All right, I think we can get started. Thanks everyone for joining. My name is Tien-tsin Huang. I'm the Payments and ID Services analyst at J.P. Morgan. Really excited to kick off the conference on our side with Mastercard. With us from Mastercard, Michael Miebach, CEO. We were just talking about his travels. He's a busy man, and really appreciate, Michael, you being here. I know how busy you are, and it means a lot to me to have you. So as us-
Thanks for having me. The first slot, and I'm happy so many people made it at 8:00 A.M.
I know, we're kicking it off. Always want to kick it off on the, in the right way with, with Mastercard. So as usual, we'll go through a fireside chat, Michael, if that's okay. Gathered a lot of questions from, from investors, and hopefully cover a lot of ground here in the next 30 minutes. So thanks again for-
Right
For being here. So you've been at Mastercard since what, 2010?
Ten, yeah.
I know you've had a lot of roles, obviously climbed through the ranks there and been a part of some very important divisions within Mastercard. Love to just hear your perspective on how the company's evolved and adapted since you've been there in what, 2010, you said?
Right. Even the answer to that question could take us 35 minutes long. I'll collapse it a bit. Mastercard today, if you compare to 14 years ago, is entirely different. So let me just take the geographic spread. At the time, I started, with the mandate to build out a business in Africa, which we didn't really have.
Mm-hmm.
Today, two-thirds of our revenue is from outside of the United States and Canada. So it really flipped around from a fairly U.S., you know, North America-centric business to a very, very international footprint. If you look at it from a product perspective, back 14 years ago, it was predominantly consumer credit-centric. Today, it is the full range of card-based solutions, credit, debit, prepaid, commercial, into distributed ledger-based, blockchain-based payment solutions, and of course, account to account. So, you know, geographic diversification, product diversification, and that is the intent. This was a very intentional journey at the time because we were coming out of the financial crisis, IPO in 2006, so it felt like there's a business that grew rapidly but was also pretty vulnerable. And with diversification, you know, it's, it's cushioned more. It showed in COVID-
Mm-hmm
How that's actually working. But as we were building out, our product set, we said, diversification is one thing on the payment side, but we have to think further and say: How do you win the differentiation game versus competitors and alternative payment solutions? It's when we started to build out that services portfolio that we learned to love so dearly, anchoring on big, secular trends like cybersecurity and big secular trends around a digitizing world, and people look for more insight. So today, that's more than a third of our revenue. So it's a very different company, from that perspective. Then you look a bit further, the technology behind to make all of this work, this is a technology conference, complete rewiring of the network.
A brand that's a top 10 brand, so we're not just a large fintech, we're also a consumer brand.
Mm-hmm.
As you know, top 10 brand in the world is not something that maybe not nine other companies can say that.
Mm-hmm.
That's pretty significant. Quite the journey, I have to say, and very intentional from the beginning.
So you recently announced some organizational changes as well.
Right.
I'm sure as part of that evolution you just described. Why, why did you make the changes? What are you trying to get out of it, Michael?
Right. So just for everybody's benefit, what we have done is, back in, at the end of 2023, I recast our regional footprint, in line with what I just said. So we're a very international footprint, and I wanted to balance out the world. So the way we face off to the world is now through the Americas and Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, as one, as the second unit, which gives us two fairly even-sized businesses and, allows us to deploy our resources in that even base, and that was the idea. So we said, okay, if you do that, the next thing to do is to fully align, our organizational structure with our strategy, our strategy to be leading in payments and in services.
If that is the highest level, that's how we reorganized our products and services' central entities. And here, never forgetting that the heart, the beating heart of Mastercard is payments, so we have now a core payments unit. That opportunity, the payments opportunity, we need to make every effort, every day to extend that long into the future, and that goes into new payment flows that are not carded. So we created new payment flows as the next, as the second payments business unit.
Mm-hmm.
And then we took all of our services around the company, we put them into one. So it sounds all very logical, and you're like: Why the, why didn't you do this before? If you think about how we grew through acquisitions, through bolt-ons, so this was a alignment after 5 years, 6 years of rapid growth through acquisitions and so forth. Just making sure we take the thrash out of the organization, put together what belongs together. Also did some portfolio readjustments where we sold a few things off. This was the time to put it in the most organized fashion to just move faster and deliver more value to our customers. No magic behind it. It's still the same strategy. It also showed the depth of our talent bench. I turned the team around. You know, we had some departures, we had some people that moved up.
The last thing I should say on that is, we've been avid users of artificial intelligence machine learning for over a decade. This was a time to really take all of our efforts around GenAI and put them together in a centralized function that will take the more centrally required decisions on where do we have foundational models, what data infrastructure do we need, while at the same time, everybody is encouraged to use generative AI. We now have a chief AI data officer function around the table as well.
All right. Good. That's helpful. So I've followed Mastercard a long time, and we've always thought of Mastercard as a growth company... and it was a very simple model with-
Right.
spend and take rate, but-
Right.
The algorithm's changed, and you just described.
Right
The organization has changed quite a bit.
Right, right.
Can you maybe help the audience here build up the components?
Yeah
-of growth in your algorithm?
You know, when I started 14 year ago, it was about, all right, here's the natural growth of the economies. Let's try to participate in that. Let's, you know, make sure we get an overproportional share of the secular shift from cash into digital, and let's win some share. That was the growth algorithm. Today, it's rather more complicated, but it's also more promising if you're more intentional about the various drivers of the digital economy, and you take it further down and you really see what are the single buttons you can press. And it starts off with capturing the growth of in payments, the growth of the economic of the economies around the world.
It is still about the secular trend, but then we could spend like half an hour talking about the secular opportunity. Let's not do that right now.
Mm-hmm.
Then it is winning share, then it is new payment flows, then it's optimizing portfolios. Those are things that we didn't think about years ago. It was just kind of be in the flow. Today, the value that we derive from using our services to help our customers to really optimize portfolio performance, what does that mean? It means authorization rates. It means predicting which transaction will actually go at the right point in time, so I can say to a CFO somewhere, "Do this transaction now, it will save you money in trying multiple times or having some sort of back-end process in your company to do that." Portfolio optimization, new payment flows, separate organizational structure today, that wasn't something that we thought about 14 years ago because it was all about cards and P2M.
So much deeper, and much more specific growth algorithm, and then the same applies in services. Because services and payments interlink, more services, more opportunity to get you into different kinds of payments is more... Payments throw out more data, new services and so forth. I talk about this, this powerful flywheel all the time. On the services side, the growth algorithm is we have, call it 50 different services. The deepening and the cross-sell into our customer base is part of our growth algorithm because we have a huge installed base around the world, and the more services we put on, that's a tremendous opportunity of growth for us. Then you go and build out and say, well, if this is my existing customer set, we are at very actively pushing beyond, retail banks, and acquirers and so forth.
So what are all the new customer types? Let's take our existing services and take them there. Take our existing services and run them across non-P2M payments into account-to-account and so forth. So you can see the growth algorithm is much, much more complex, but it is also full of opportunity. Today, we are very deliberate about every single component of that.
Sure. So you mentioned person-to-merchant-
Right
payments, so I do want to dig into that.
Mm.
and the secular opportunity left. We do get that question a lot, Michael.
Right.
Of course, the card conversion story, we're so accustomed to examining it.
Right.
Maybe walk us through the U.S., Europe, Latam-
Right
your big markets. What's left in terms of the secular opportunity?
Right.
What's ahead?
So I mean, we're really good at digitizing the world.
Mm-hmm.
So I do get the question as well that you get is: "So once you digitize the world, then what?" Well, the point is, the denominator keeps growing. So that's the first thing. We see economic growth around the world, in the developed markets as well around, and not everything starts off in the current form or fashion. There's cash, but it also happens outside of cards in different forms of payment. There's a lot more choice in payments today. So you know, you see a landscape that's broad, and there's a lot more opportunity for us to go, at any given point in time this year or over the next five years, to go after, you know, payments that we don't have today. So if that's the starting point, this landscape looks a little different market by market.
Take the United States, you know, this is a market that is highly digitized, but if you just were to look at total payment volume and TAM, the market is so huge that even, let's pick a number, 10% is just such a large number. So we, we will be busy for years just with the United States. And how do you go after it? You go after it with fintechs. You go after it with neobanks. They're gonna look at the underbanked. You know, it's a whole host of things that, that we could be doing, but it's also looking beyond the volume opportunity into the transaction opportunity. What happened after COVID? Before COVID, you went to a restaurant and you paid your your bill.
Today, the ratio of order-in is much higher than it was before, and that is multiple transactions because you've got to pay the marketplace, the marketplace pays the restaurant, and we try to be in the whole value chain of every one of these payments.
Right.
The same is in transit, the same as in, you know, Booking.com, Agoda, the whole online travel agencies. So there's a whole set of business models that are much more prevalent today. That's the transaction opportunity. Remember, we price per transaction and for volume, so we can toggle. You go into Europe, you see some of the same that you see in the United States, but in Europe, you still have significant opportunity to go after cash as well. So the transaction opportunity is there, the shared economy, the delivery economy. But take in Italy, a market with significant levels of cash. Some of the Central Europe large economies, France and Germany, little less cash, but still, there's still a lot to go after, post-COVID, for us.
You go all the way into emerging markets, you think 10 years out, Africa today, you have 80%+. No, it's pretty clear that the tools are not the same. If you go into Africa, where is the transaction happening? It's happening on a phone. So mobile-based financial services, you have to really become very deliberate and very local in your approach to, to go after that. Our investment into MTN, the largest telco in Africa, our previous investment in Airtel, it just shows how we're thinking about that in a very different way. And then the two big elephants in the room that we should talk about is China.
Mm-hmm.
Unlocking China, that's a tremendous share opportunity for us. And then there's Japan. Huge opportunity, not very digitized, friendly government, and we're welcome.
Yeah. You mentioned China, so let's talk about it.
Right, yeah.
You do have one of the few with a license to perform under a JV structure.
Right.
What's the latest there? And the opportunity obviously hasn't historically opened up-
Right, right
To foreign players.
So there is one other foreign player that has had a license, I think, since 2019, which is Amex.
Right.
Fairly, relatively small market share in China. Obviously, there is the big player with UnionPay, and as of May this year, mid-May, we are live in China. So that's great. That's exciting. We are not starting from zero in China. That's important to know. Obviously, we had a cross-border business for years.
Mm-hmm.
We have a services business. We got all the tools there. But the proposition that we can now offer, that nobody else can really offer, is a fully domestic issued and usable card, and combined in one single card with the best acceptance globally. Because UnionPay cannot offer that, Amex cannot offer that, only we can offer both of that, and, you know, there's another large American payment company which does not have a license today. So it puts us in a very unique position. Issuers are putting out programs because they are excited by this proposition for their customers, Chinese consumers, Chinese business people who are traveling. So we are very busy putting out the issuing programs. We're busy with the acquiring side of things.
But it's also important to know that from day one, every one of these single-use issued cards, those credentials can be used in the Chinese wallets. So you get a bit of a head start on the acceptance side, but we will be very busy building out our own acceptance. That's very important. The Chinese government gave this a license after a ten-year journey, and today we're in a position where, you know, the Chinese are looking to connect their economy more better internationally. They're looking for inbound tourism and so forth. So this is a good time to engage and help them on that journey. At the same time, we have... We're not naive. Geopolitically, this is not an easy time, and we have to pace this carefully.
I look at it through a medium-term lens, but it's pretty exciting and very unique for us.
Yeah, no, for sure. We're excited to track it. Now, thanks for going through that. So let's. I want to make sure we hit a few other topics.
Right.
On the new payment flows, maybe if we go dig into that a little bit. We have a lot of tech companies at the conference that are going to be going after what you're enabling, whether it be commercial or-
Mm-hmm
Disbursements, remittances. We have a couple remittance companies-
Right
So what, what's your goal there in terms of enabling some of these new payment flows? What's your role, and how do you see it forming here in the short, mid, long term for Mastercard?
Right. So, when we started speaking about new payment flows, 2017 Investor Day-
Yeah.
Probably you were there.
Mm-hmm.
I was there. I think it was the first time we laid it out, just as a theoretical opportunity. It was a massive TAM. We're now much more targeted when it comes to that. So we're particularly excited around commercial, and here, very specifically, the large market and SME opportunity on one hand, and the B2B accounts payable opportunity. And we're also pretty excited about disbursements and remittances. There's bill pay, there's others out there, but these ones, we have in focus, and yes, there are a lot of companies out there. The way I look at this is, this is an ecosystem very much the same that we have on the P2M side. There are people who we can enable and people that are, so to say, the tentacles in the ecosystem because we are B2B2C. I don't want to be with the end user.
That is not our forte, but if we can enable a lot of specialist companies, you know, then that's a good thing for us. Now, that market, if you take commercial POS, I mean, T&E cards have been around for 50 years, and it feels like over years we've been driving, like, with the handbrake on. The market just hasn't come and grown to the level. Why is that?
Mm.
Because, you know, a lot of that pay side of the market was T&E based, and that was never a real exciting topic outside of the, a few markets, Australia, US, UK, and so forth. In emerging markets, that was never a thing. Most of these cards were on consumer sides, and they never took off. I feel we're in a different stage now. We're coming out of COVID. A lot more companies have digitized. A lot more CFOs are very different people, who now have a kind of a knack for digital solutions. They're interested in that. They're reorganizing their back offices. Larger companies are looking to take cost out, so B2B payment solutions suddenly in focus, and they're more exciting than they were ever before. On the SME side, what's the difference to a consumer card?
You could argue, well, there's a lot of governments who are now interested, who want very specific SME solutions. And look at the working capital side of things. If you're a small business and suddenly somebody can say, "Well, you can keep buying your supplies, whatever you're buying, and you get 30 days of credit," while they're otherwise not getting good, you know, good lending support from SME specialist players. There are not that many around in the world. So we're at a time where leaning into this market feels a lot more promising than it did 5 years ago. So there's an unlock there, I feel. We've invested in technology, we got Smart Data , we got in controls, a bunch of expense management solutions, which are leading in the market. We're the leader on virtual cards. So excited.
We hired specialist people now because, talk to these new CFOs, you need different people. You cannot have the retail cards person try to sell that, so specialist sales force, it all comes together. The B2B accounts payable side, there's a few other elements to it that are specific. This is for large companies in the buyer-supplier relationship. There are specialist companies who are we, which we are working with, but here we can tune this and in a way, through finding smarter go-to-market, through ERP backend systems, for example, SAP, Oracle, they are now partners where embed our virtual card capability in the backend of a company as part of their tech, tech stack. So that drives a real different growth model for us. So slightly different approach, but overall, I feel commercial is at an, it's an unlock time.
Disbursement and remittances, that's been a captive market between a few global banks and exchange houses. That is opening up significantly. We're partnering with a whole range from Paysend to Payoneer. There's a whole list of companies that we're partnering with, and for us, it's really the scale. It's 150 currencies, it's 180 countries, 10 billion endpoints, and that is very hard to offer for any one of them. But every one of them can be an endpoint or a destination point in a transaction, and if we can sit in the middle and facilitate that, that's important. This is a difficult business from a KYC, AML, FX perspective, so we have those capabilities. We made a few acquisitions in that space, and we feel very well positioned.
So I feel we have the tools, it feels it's the time, and our B2B2C approach, where we very clearly say we want to partner and not compete, helps us a lot.
Yeah. Now, we hear Mastercard a lot, and a lot of those environments, virtual card is obviously very important. We hear Mastercard quite a bit, but you, you mentioned growing share in general,
Yes, we love growing share.
As part of the growth algorithm, I think I've asked you a lot of questions on the earnings calls around some of the wins that you've had with fintechs-
Mm-hmm.
-and banks, even on the virtual side, virtual card side. So, so tell us about why Mastercard wins these deals, and I've heard you talk about price discipline as well.
Mm-hmm.
Beyond price, what does it take to win?
Right
In general on the network side?
We had a few, we had more than a few, very significant wins-
Mm-hmm
Over the last, call it 4, 4 or 5 years.
It's been a good run.
Europe's been a bright spot on that, so there's a lot of share gain in Europe. Some bigger ones here in the United States on the debit side recently, which we haven't seen in a long time, and then, of course, in the broader international footprint. So why is that? The first thing I want to say is we're very deliberate on what we want to win. It's not like, let's go after everything, and then this is the outcome of it. The outcome, the wins that you're seeing is we felt we should be winning those. Take the U.K.; it's pretty clear if you win, if you have a big partnership with one of the large U.K. banks, then that's good for you from a presence perspective, from a flow perspective, from a relevance perspective.
So we make these decisions from that perspective. Here is where we want to go really far, and then how do you win it? Well, when you decide what you want to go after is, we really try to turn this into a conversation that is not, "Let me give you a basis points more on the cost side for your payment transaction cost as part of your operating cost as bank XYZ.
Mm-hmm.
What are you trying to do? How can we help you change your top line? Better customer engagement, end user, engagement, better auth rates, better XYZ," and this is where the services portfolio really is a differentiator for us. We have had opportunities where you could say to a bank is, we invest in your outcome. So here is a particular arrangement that we have 10% upside. So you, if you trust your own solutions, you can engage and have a top-line conversation with the customer. So that is how that has changed. It's gotten more difficult because there are competitors who are building out portfolios like, you know, services portfolios. As we do, we try to stay ahead, and so far, I think that's working well for us. But it's also true the market is, is competitive and there are competitive pressures.
So what we're trying to do is be very, very deliberate where we invest our capital, rebates, incentives, been recently a topic that's been talked about, so we very actively manage that. So that in the end, it all adds up, where all adds up from a perspective of we have to be in the transaction. That's why we want to go after deal XYZ. If we are in the transactions, an opportunity to drive services, services give us more opportunity for more, to see more payments with that particular customer, and in the end, it drives a net revenue yield. So it's, you know, it's a pretty disciplined process. If Sachin were here on the stage, he would nod now and then go in a lot more detail on how we do that, but that's basically our approach.
Okay.
And, you know, one last thing that,
Yeah
... that, that he did manage, he did mention is, if you have a unique services portfolio, it does drive upside for the customer, that we can, you know, put a hand on heart and say, "You will have that upside," you can price for value as well.
Yeah.
Which we always try to do.
No, I think you've been very clear in going through the value-added services strategy as an approach there-
Right
To be all-encompassing. That is a premium growth business for you today-
Right.
And it feels like it, it should continue. But what can you tell us about whether it be the cyclicality or the build or the mix of business that's changing there?
Right.
to think about, okay, why is this going to be a premium grower for the long term?
Right, right. So the value-add services side of the house, back to the flywheel, it allows us to differentiate our payment solutions, win more payments volume. When you have that differentiator, you start to drive insights for your customer that gives, because you have the payments volume, you get the insights on that, and the customer says: "Well, what other services do you have that can help me to do something with this insight now?
Mm-hmm.
If you look at the range of services that we offer today, I think I said in the last earnings call, carefully curated.
Mm-hmm.
It's not words I generally use every day, but you know, that is exactly, it's exactly the description here, if you think about our Test & Learn platform. So what is that? What does that do? It's basically you take a lot of data of a customer, let's say it's a retailer. The retailer is trying to figure out, what do I put at my shelf, at what point in time? That's what Test & Learn simulates. It's a cost saving in one way, and then a campaign optimizing on the other hand. Does this have anything to do with payments? No, but it's a starting point to engage a customer. Engage the customer, and then you say: "All right, I know now what I want on my shelf and by when." Then you have, well, we have marketing services.
We can actually help you, to put it out there. Then, you know, I'm running this campaign through the marketing services, saying: How do I drive through the clutter that every one of us has in our lives every day, where you get a zillion emails a day that don't feel particularly personalized? Well, you need a personalized message to actually drive the upside for the customer. That's Dynamic Yield. None of this have anything to do with payments, but it's all around the transaction because somebody's buying something. If you get the right campaign in a highly personalized fashion, then that's when the circle closes. So it is a highly curated, set of, activities that we do for our customers. And obviously, cybersecurity and fraud management runs across all of that.
Sure.
So it is across the whole value chain, before and after the payment transaction. That is the portfolio, and we therefore believe, as we look ahead, if we stay in tune with consumer expectations and technology change, that model will wander a bit over time, but it will still be the same approach. Get in the core business of the customer, which is never payments, and then come with our core payment solutions and bring it together. So that's the approach, and that's why I believe it will work. You know, some of the recent new products that we put out on the services side, what am I particularly excited about? Let's take a generative AI topic. Decision Intelligence was always our fraud scoring, machine learning for years.
And we said: "Hey, you know, this is, this transaction is likely to be non-fraudulent. Let it pass through." Now, this is GenAI enabled. We see a lift of 20% of the auth rates going through from this product, Decision Intelligence Pro. So very exciting. Smart Subscriptions. All of us have subscriptions in our life. Way too many. We don't know where those tokens are and what, where we've given the card. Great product is out there and helps us to engage our customers, because if that's provided through your bank app, the banks love it because people come to them to look for, where did I give my payment credentials? So just a couple of examples. As long as we keep innovating around that idea, I think we have a real winner.
Yeah, and we've learned a lot from it. I mean, we talk about the need to have more breadth of service and payments.
Right.
You can't just do payments-
Right.
and I think Mastercard's been really early on with that. Some of the
You see it as we, you know, show our revenue in a different way now.
Yeah.
You know, it's helpful to see exactly what each one of them do, but they're very interdependent. One does not work with the other. So if you focus on the growth rate in services, great, we do, and the growth rate in payments, but in the end, it comes down to what does the overall model do? Because it is that flywheel, one without the other... I don't want to be a SaaS company.
Yeah.
I want to be at the intersection of payments and services, and it comes together. But I think it was good for us to show how each one of them is ticking, but they tick together as well, that we tried to talk about.
No, definitely. I think you were, again, early on with it. Some of it was built organically. I remember the old bill pay business and RPPS and all this good stuff.
Right. RPPS
'Cause I'm a dinosaur.
Yes.
But, you've also acquired a lot of assets within-
Right
the value-added services piece. So, so help us think about the go forward here. Is there going to be a bigger contribution, perhaps from M&A, as you pursue this value-added services and new flows strategy, Michael?
Yes, here's the answer. That was not yes, there will be.
Yeah.
Yes, here is the answer. We have always looked through the lens of our strategy, when it comes to the decision, buy or build, build or buy. And, you know, when you take something like Dynamic Yield, personalization is just something we had no street cred, we had no capability. We bought the number one in the world. Great, that would, that's exactly the kind of logic that we have. If it's in our wheelhouse, we rather invest and build it organically. Otherwise, we go ahead, and we acquire. So going forward, that will not change. Healthy balance sheet, our capital allocation principles are absolutely unchanged, but we will keep looking, and we talked about what our priorities are. You know, the services portfolio needs to evolve, but it's around the transaction before and after what matters.
Digital identity mattered at a point. Personalization mattered at a point. We will stay ahead of the curve, and we'll keep looking there. Where is another position that we can take in a vertical, where we're not present today, that would be a good logic, et cetera, et cetera. So strategy-led, we're not looking for undervalued assets because we're not an investor. That's what you are. We're looking to bolt it on and make our proposition stronger.
Yeah, well, we're watching how you curate it, so-
Right
As you, in your words. All right, we've got four minutes left. You mentioned AI, GenAI, so I'll ask about it. You've got a ton of data at Mastercard, trillions of volume.
Right.
How do you plan to utilize this technology?
Right.
We've been asking a lot of different companies, right?
Yeah.
Is there an opportunity to amplify growth through the tech, or is it more about improving productivity?
Well, it starts off with we are in a differentiated, and I would argue, preferred position because we do have a lot of data.
Sure.
That's a function of the payments business, it's a function of what the services business together. So, we've also have the chops in when it comes to technology. We've been a leader in AI for whatever the last decade. We have 143 billion transactions through our network. How do we manage that and make sure it goes through when it goes through and it doesn't when it shouldn't? Well, that's AI. GenAI, we have recently used to tune our cybersecurity solutions. But to your specific question, where do we go from here? But clearly there is an internal optimization opportunity. Like for most companies out there, you would say, "I can make my coding more effective.
I can make internal knowledge management more effective." All of that, that's important, and we will do that, and we are doing that. I'm personally more excited in what you can do on the product side. So how can you make better offerings, and where's the world going? I think we're looking at an ecosystem where it's gonna be more personal. That whole personalization thing that I talked about, that's a lot about AI. What is the data that is out there that is known, that you can match with your personal preferences, and around a digital commerce transaction, it could make that transaction so much easier? In the moment, booking a trip just is a thing of a minute instead of wasting your whole weekend.
Yeah.
So those are, you know, assistance and, you know, services offered through B2B2C, where we can help with because we have a lot of data, and we can put out such solutions and assistance, which we've done with Shopping Muse, which takes your shopping preferences and helps you buy a blue suit if you so choose. So I think that side of the thing, that side of the equation is actually more interesting. So with our new head of Chief AI and Data Officer, I, you know, should expect that we'll do more in that space, but we're excited about it. I am personally.
Good. I'm sad we only have 1 minute and 19 seconds left.
Okay.
Um...
I'll try to be very crisp, whatever you're asking me.
No, I'm just trying to think of a closing question.
Mm.
I think just we were talking before about how you're traveling all over the world-
Right
Meeting all different types of people, which, I'm sure you're so busy. Again, thanks for being with us. So from a macro perspective or tech perspective-
Mm
I won't ask about geopolitical. What, what do you think-
Mm
... is the most intriguing or interesting things that we should be tracking going forward here as we think about Mastercard?
Right. So there, there's the bigger landscape around us. So what is out there is, we just talked about GenAI. Then there is cloud, then there is 5G.
Yeah.
Then there's edge computing. All of this thing, all of these things coming together at the same time will do one, one thing over the next four or five years. It allows to deliver any kind of experience anywhere in the world at any moment. So we have a lot of these components, we just talked about some of them, where we can play a role in that. So the, the digital commerce experience that you can deliver in Indonesia or they deliver here in Boston, then doesn't need to be any difference any longer. So that's a tremendous growth opportunity for us. Think secular opportunity we discussed at the beginning. So all of these technologies, you can deliver any experience anywhere. I'm excited about that. But then you break it down one level in zero seconds.
In this, in this world, with all of these digital transactions, with your full preferences and data management and trust and so forth, in there, the need for this to be a safe world is gonna rise to the top. So all of these technologies will allow us to do so many things. How do you keep the world safe? Well, I think it's gonna be a world where everything is gonna be 100% biometrically authenticated, everything will be tokenized, and every transaction will be individually authenticated as well.
Mm-hmm.
That is what we do for a living. So if the world, when the world takes all these technologies and puts them to bear everywhere, I think there's tremendous opportunity for us. I'm very excited. So at the macro level, this is exciting, but at the keep it all safe, it's also exciting for us.
It's good stuff. Michael, thank you for your time.
Tien-tsin, thank you very much.
Great to have you.
Thank you. Thank you.