All right, I think we'll get started here. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. My name's Will Nance. I cover payments at Goldman Sachs. We're delighted to have Michael Miebach here, CEO of Mastercard. So Michael, thanks for joining us.
Hey, Will. Thanks for having us.
Michael, maybe we could start by getting your perspective on the macro environment. You know, what have you been seeing in terms of consumer spending trends of late? You know, I think, you know, broadly speaking, the consumer has outperformed everyone's expectations so far this year. What are you seeing on the ground?
Right. Well, that is the headline. The consumer has been outperforming expectations. Obviously, our business is a good indicator of what the consumer's doing. We have more data probably than many others. So what we're seeing is a resilient consumer, all throughout. We told you that in the second quarter conference call, and, as we look at data running up until the end of August, we continue to see the same trend. So resilient consumer, that's good. We're not the economic oracles, as we look forward, it, you know, it continues to be about monitoring the factors that drive consumer spend. So what we see is, we see a solid, job market. We see solid wage growth. In the end, it's about net consumer wallet spend, so that's, that's looking, encouraging. You know, access to credit is there.
Excess savings haven't been spent fully down, so we continue to monitor that as we have been all throughout. Then, you know, it is what are central banks up to? So they have clearly committed, they're gonna do everything that's needed to curb inflation. It remains elevated. It's moderating a bit, particularly in the United States. So if we, you know, all think back about Jackson Hole, the commitment is there, so we'll just stay close to that. In different countries, there will be different sets of responses to that. We'll have a multi-varied economic set of economies around the world as a truly global business. I guess in the end, that's good for us, in terms of it goes better here, maybe if it doesn't go so well over there. So that's overall the headline.
You know, from a switched volume perspective, looking at what we see, domestic side broadly normalized to pre-crisis levels. That's good. You know, bright spot is T&E. That's particularly good. The spending on services and experiences and so forth, continues. We see some select international markets with some moderation. You know, if you just pick an example, take the UK, high inflation rate, high share of variable mortgages impact on the consumer wallet, but in aggregate, it still means the consumer is holding up. On a cross-border side, it just continues to power on.
Yeah.
Good picture overall.
Maybe we can dig into the cross-border trends. I mean, this has been an important revenue driver-
Right.
For Mastercard. What is the state of cross-border today, travel and non-travel? And, you know, where do you see kinda pockets of remaining recovery?
Right. You know, I traveled over the summer. It's hard to get a ticket at a decent price. So people will continue to travel as they can. Capacity isn't fully back. You know, if you look at it through a lens of our business, we are—if you just look at how cross-border travel is looking vis-à-vis pre-crisis levels, we're at 150%. So you know, we're back. So that, that's good. It hasn't moderated, so this original theory that could be revenge travel, and then it's gonna come back down, it has held up. That is very encouraging. And on the cross-border ex-travel piece, which had increased at the beginning of COVID, that just stayed elevated. So overall, it's important for our business, and it continues to look very positive.
I think the trend here helps us a lot because we're well-positioned in travel to start with. Yeah. Last call, we talked about Expedia. We talked about Miles & More, Lufthansa. There's a lot of wins there, and those portfolios are performing well in relative terms, so that's all very good for us.
Yeah. There've been a lot of focus on the reopening in Asia. What are the Asia cross-border trends been doing?
You know, we called out, I think it was two quarters ago, where Sachin went to calculate the numbers with a very fine pencil to figure out what is the trend in China, outbound versus inbound. You know, the headline, we still continue to be behind 2019 levels. So there's still catch-up potential, particularly in Asia and China probably being the biggest. So we're staying close to that, and try to reap the benefits of that. Our recent partnership with Alipay to put in, you know, your, let's say, U.S.-issued card into your Alipay wallet. I tried it. It works really quite well, so we're ready for the travel inbound to come back.
Got it. Makes sense. Maybe switching gears to Europe. You've announced a lot of large wins in Europe over the past couple of years. Can you just give us an update? You know, what have you announced and, you know, more broadly, what's been driving you guys to be able to win in each of these situations?
Well, I love talking about our wins. I wanna reframe the question a little bit, as in, it wasn't just Europe, but, you know, there were a few significant ones. You know, if we think back over the last couple of years, NatWest, Deutsche Bank, you know, First Direct, and as of late, UniCredit, which we talked about in our last earnings call. So that's tremendous, but it's not just Europe. Citizens, a recent one, you know, Fiserv Money Network. So if you take a step back and say, "Why are we winning? What is going on in the market?" It's a competitive market. It's a great time to be in payments. You have a lot of local competitors, particularly in Europe. We have other international competitors, so these deals are hard-fought.
You know, it's pretty clear for us, we have to win a diversification and differentiation game and not just a pricing game. And here is, you know, what comes to play in winning these deals is a truly unique set of services that our customers value and that help us bring these deals. Any one of them is a different combination of services that, in the end, got us the deal and different interests that these banks have. UniCredit, for example, they were particularly keen on our digital-first program. It's kind of the equivalent what we did with the Apple Card. So that's a program for us which we shipped around the world. They like that. They like our sustainability agenda, and we're partnering on that front.
So different customers, different reasons, but it's that diversified portfolio that helps us keep winning. Financials do matter. You see our disaggregated revenues on the revenue side, on the services side. In the end, we bring all of this together to manage a net revenue yield, which we have managed to increase.
Got it. I wanted to hit on a couple strategy points, but maybe before we jump in, you know, I was hoping we could touch on a couple of the recent headlines. Mastercard released a blog post today, some articles talking about pricing and specifically interchange. Any comments you can share on that?
Right. So my headline on that headline of the journal report is that the article is plainly wrong. So it's misrepresenting what's actually going on. We have had no plans, and we have no plans to change interchange this fall in the United States, and we made that very clear to the publication. We made it clear in a blog post today, and we made it clear with our customers because, of course, we all read the same news, and it was clear to set the record straight, which, in fact, was actually the head of our blog today, "Set the Record Straight." In the end, when it comes to pricing, you know, it's pretty clear. I remind you what the article is talking about is interchange. Of course, you are well-versed in our business model.
Network fees, service fees, interchange, all very different things, so there is no change in interchange. We price for value, and we will continue to do that as we bring new products and solutions to the market, and we will price for that. But that's not what the article was alleging, and we set that record straight.
Right. Very helpful. So maybe switching gears to strategy. You've outlined three strategic priorities for Mastercard: expanding in payments, extending services, and embracing new networks. You know, starting with payments, can you just talk about the opportunity that exists in person-to-merchant payments-
Right.
and the key initiatives you have to address that opportunity?
Right, so three pillars, they all interlink. Yeah, I was just talking about the wins in Europe. We win because we have services, and we have a, you know, deep moat in payments, and we have solutions there to go after that. The opportunity in P2M, you could argue we have been incredibly successful in digitizing the world of cash, digitizing the world of checks. But the, you know, the universe continues to grow. Just think about developed markets and the emerging markets. There's tremendous opportunity and still just shifting the goalpost on that and, growing that volume. But there's also a massive transaction opportunity in all of this. When you think about some of the new business models emerging, we just had DoorDash here, I think, on stage.
Imagine, you know, DoorDash, you order something from DoorDash, so that's a card transaction on file. Well, DoorDash has to pay the restaurant, and then the restaurant, you know, DoorDash has to pay the driver as well. If you go to the restaurant, that's one transaction. In this case, it's three transactions. You take all these business models that really didn't exist before COVID at the same scale, at the same pace of growth. So there's tremendous opportunity there. So as we look at P2M, it's about finding more of these of these business models, be very fintech oriented, be emerging tech oriented. You know, we have various verticals that we now have in the company that we didn't have before, and find all new partnerships.
How do you turbocharge that whole opportunity and go after it, is by creating more and more acceptance, more places that you can use your Mastercard payment credential, whichever form factor it's in. And yeah, I think we've done... I'm obviously biased, but we've done a pretty decent job. You know, we doubled from 50 million to over 100 million in the last 5 years in terms of acceptance points, and it continues to grow. And you do this with contactless. You do it with tap-on-phone. Every one of the phones that have in your pocket could be a connected commerce device. You could be a merchant, and somebody could pay you on something that might have been cash before. So a lot to do, and then you play it out even further. Think about the strategic theaters of the future. Think Africa.
So how do you deliver digitization and financial services in Africa? It's all based on the phone. And here we just signed a partnership with MTN, one of the large telcos in Africa. We previously had one in West Africa, focused on West Africa with Airtel. So new partnerships, yet again, drive opportunity to go after that P2M opportunity. So it's tremendous. It's long term. I think while we are very successful at it, we're not quite done with digitizing the world just yet.
I guess a lot of that cash to card remaining opportunity is in the emerging markets. Is it, is it getting difficult, more difficult or easier, to drive digitization in those markets?
You know, our experience in emerging markets is. It's not just, you know, off-the-shelf solutions out of developed economies. We really develop in emerging markets. We have a lab based out of Nairobi, where we specifically design products and solutions for emerging markets. I used to run our Middle East and Africa business for five years. So this is oftentimes the long-talked-about leapfrog opportunity for Africa to change the way we do business elsewhere. For example, around the telco strategy is actually coming out of Africa. So, I don't think it's more important. There's an opportunity to avoid some of the hindrances of legacy technology as we go there. Lighter, easier, cheaper, and more flexible to give consumers what they actually need. You have to start, though, to really deeply understand what the consumers is about.
Their life is very different than your life and my life, so we have a lot of people there that actually spend time journaling the day and understanding how that is different.
It's a-
Significant long-term business opportunity.
... I guess, beyond person-to-merchant payments, this is a targeted set of new flows that you guys are pursuing. Can you give us some examples of how you're capitalizing on that new flows opportunity? What are some of the growth vectors that have you most excited?
Right. So while we are excited about P2M, you know, we are excited about lots of things, including flows that we're not in at all. So what we said in our investor community day back in 2021 was here specific, four specific flows that we're gonna go after in terms of the next opportunity for us to have Mastercard payment credentials in and a services opportunity, and so forth. So the logic at the time was, which still holds, is, you know, total addressable market, that's pretty clear. High levels of cash and check, clear pain points, and a, you know, high belief that we can deliver against those pain points. So that's what we said. The biggest part of that is around the broad space of commercial and B2B, which two subsets, commercial POS and then B2B accounts payable.
We also talked about sends and remittances, you know, disbursements and remittances, and we talked about bill pay. So we're very excited about commercial. I wanna spend a little bit more time about that one. So commercial POS, here you have a world where we can go in with our existing tools, our carded tools, as they are there. There's very little need to build anything new. So think about fleet card, T&E, think about small business cards, and so forth. And then tag on a few additional features like expense control logic, our smart data solution. Think about easy savings and discounts for small businesses, and so forth. Nothing too fancy.
If you take that and you put it in the hand of a sales force that's vertically oriented and goes after a sector that's been traditionally underserved by financial institutions, where you have specialist players, you make these specialist players your partners, you go after it, then you get the growth that we're seeing. It's about 13% of our total GDV and grows at 24%. I said in the last earnings call, that's faster than consumer. We like that. So that's an engine that you can churn. Are there other tools in there that we can use? Of course, we can, but for now, it is not about building new stuff, it's about going after what is out there in a segment that has been lagging.
So yeah, you can almost start to repeat what we've done with P2M in a sector that is adjacent to it. Accounts payable, big flows, big pain points, very clearly understood. Just covered in a journal in a piece, our Head of Commercial Solutions and our Chief Product Officer talked about a trend in B2B payments, where everybody's kind of fed up with inefficient processes. So the digitization that we all have in our lives, companies want that. The people who work in these departments see it every day, that it works in their personal life. Why is it clunky and bad when it comes to the day on the job? So here, a bit more of work on the product side, but relatively simple to do, and then you find a big unlock in different go-to-markets.
SAP, Taulia, Coupa, GEP, and you- we embed ourselves in the ERP systems that these companies have. Tremendous growth. The big unlock here for us is our virtual card platform, we're the market leaders in virtual card, and that is how you optimize accounts receivable and so forth. So that is progressing at a very healthy clip. We haven't released numbers on, on that, but we like what we see quite a bit. Send remittances. So the whole send piece growing above 20%, well above over 20%. We like that. The growth vectors here is new geographies. We have 10 billion endpoints today in this network, so that's pretty decent, but there are still countries that, we, where we can go in deeper and more use cases. Gaming payouts, for example, is a recent one.
I think I called out Interchecks in a, in the call. Brings us to the last one, bill pay. Think healthcare. What's the share of cards? It's low. Education, utilities, low. So all that is right in front of us. We have a whole range of assets through our MPS acquisition. Sorry, the Nets Corporate Services part in Europe, to go after bill pay. We have RPPS, our bill pay directory in the U.S., and we have carded solutions. It's about creating acceptance yet again, and a mix of all of that makes that a very interesting business. So it's very specific stuff. It's not about building ecosystems and two-sided networks, which is very hard, as we've learned over the years. This is easy stuff that we... Not easy, actually.
I should not oversimplify, but it's stuff that is very, very doable in the near term, and we've learned a lot. These are all. You have to understand the treasurer of the mid-sized companies. We hire people that know that, give them a vertical structure, and they run after it. So we're excited about new flows to extend the target market.
Yeah, makes sense. And where does Mastercard Send fit into that strategy? I know more the capability, but what-
Well, so yeah, this is the whole, this is, you know, one of the four flows as, you know, disbursements and remittances, so this has got a cross-border part to it. The domestic part, I'll give you just some examples. The cross-border side of this is our acquisition of Transfast, which gave us a real stuff push ahead. So many of these called gig economy. Let's take all those developers in countries outside of the US that help the tech industry here, where many of the companies are there. That is powered by Send. Chinese students and paying their tuitions is the latest use case that is just agreed. So it's again, it's geographies, it's use cases. There we go, and very healthy growth rate.
Makes sense. So I guess the second pillar of your strategy is focused on expanding in services. Can you discuss why value-added services is so important, and-
Right.
Talk about the opportunities you see in that space?
So we talked about the wins in Europe. Differentiation, that's, that's really the headline, but it's not only that. It's diversification of revenue base, it's driving revenue growth. It's growing faster than our underlying core business. Now that we have the revenue disaggregation, you see that more clearly. So that's a business that's growing fast. Now, we had plenty of choice where we wanted to have our services. We do have, you know, very specific set of very specific processing service for fintech, for the fintech segment. But, you know, that is, it's almost surgical how we look at that. We have a gateway service that's also surgical. They're really big trends. I would almost describe them as secular trends. In a digitized world, a digitizing world is, one, is safety and security.
In a rapidly digitizing world, your threats, your potential for cyber threats are increasing dramatically. So we said every potential solution we can have around cybersecurity will be a good one. So that's a big part of our services. And the other is the same data footprint that is thrown off by this rapidly digitizing world. Any one of our customers will want to understand more on what to do with that data to drive better decisions for their business, so data and analytics. That's the two big focuses for us organizationally, lovingly called C&I and D&S, in Mastercard speak. And the solutions that we have in there, multifaceted to drive the key kind of decisions that customers want to take on the data side and the key threats that they have on, on the, on the cyber side.
So one of the recent examples that we talked about on the C&I side is. I find it particularly interesting because it's not on card-based volume. This is actually on account-to-account-based volume. It's our customer fraud risk solution in the U.K. Nine big banks, the who's who of British banking, from Lloyds to Barclays to NatWest and so forth, are partnering with us to have a scheme that basically allows them to prevent payment scams. Because we have a unique vantage point as a network across all these payment flows, we can see that, and we can bring that service. Tremendous opportunity to take our C&I business further than what it is today. Overall, we're very happy with that business. On the D&S side, the assets are consulting, marketing services, loyalty, data analytics yet again.
I'm particularly interested and excited about our latest acquisition there, around personalization, Dynamic Yield. If you think about all these companies who want to engage their customers post-COVID, "Book this airline ticket with me first and not with the other airline," how do you get a targeted offer to that cust- to that consumer? Personalization, hyper-personalization is the answer. A lot of GenAI. We have 14 minutes left. I got to the word GenAI right here.
Perfect.
That is what we're doing there. So it's a good portfolio. In the end, diversification, differentiation, revenue growth, we love our services.
Got it. So maybe switching to new networks, the third strategic priority. Can you discuss the new networks opportunities that you are pursuing, and just give us an update on kind of where you stand?
It's almost poetic, embrace new networks. You know, we were looking for a term that describes what this is. It took us 50 years to build a network that we have, and we were convinced that our core competencies of running a large multilateral network can be distilled and can be brought to other opportunities, but you have to really embrace the opportunity. We said, "So where are areas where somebody has data and somebody else needs data that are close to the digital commerce value chain?" You know, digital identity was just the obvious thing. In every transaction you need to know, is Will really Will, and is Michael really Michael, and whatever the transaction is. Can be a payment transaction, but here's the opportunity, can be any other transaction as well.
So that's how we thought about it, and the same for Open Banking, which is, again, you know, about building a data network, which obviously can be adjacent to many other things that we do. That was the logic. In terms of readiness, if you compare this to the P2M opportunity or the expansion of our flows that we discussed earlier, this is a little bit of a slower burn. So from a timing perspective, it's a little bit behind where we are there. But we do have regulatory approach around Open Banking. We have a lot of interest from government in digital identity, so the space is coming. We have high level of conviction that that will be the next big opportunity for us.
If you think about it, we'll take the interlocking circles of Mastercard brand before the transaction and after the transaction, and not only in the transaction. That's what we're trying to do. You start off small. We bought, you know, a few additional assets to what we had, an acquisition, in the digital identity space, company by the name of Ekata out of Seattle, and that business is tremendous now. So we have, you know, over 10 billion digital identity events that we're using to, you know, provide scores to our customers. Is Michael really Michael? And exciting examples out of the crypto space, a lot of crypto exchanges have this question around, you know, transaction identity, and then they come to us, and we facilitate that.
So that's exciting on CNI, D&S, and yeah, that's running across the board into new networks. So that's where we go next. Payments today, services today, and then an opportunity in the future.
On the open banking side, I mean, you guys are very well positioned. I mean, Finicity is a kind of a-
Right.
One of the big players in the US. You also have a European asset, I believe. I mean, how do you think about the competitive landscape in that space, how the frame or the infrastructure for open banking evolves?
So, you know, when we stepped into open banking, initially, it was our own, in-house made product. We felt it's too slow, it's not good enough, we need reach. So we need to buy connectivity and capabilities, so we bought Finicity in the US. So we have a reach of into 95% of all US deposit accounts. That gives us a good starting point, and we have four very clear use cases. It's lend, it's pay, it's small business, and it's account verification. So we're not looking very far, very far. Those are things that sell today, that people need for, you know, a lot of tech companies that open all types of, all types of accounts. So well-positioned here.
In Europe, Aiia is comparatively smaller than Finicity was here in the U.S., but it gives us connection into 3,000 European banks, and we follow the same logic. Those are the two key markets. We have now built connectivity in Australia as well. It's a global trend, and we have a global ambition. So open banking, good. I think we have yet to see which will be the ultimate winning use cases that truly scale up. I think, you know, we're certainly in the lead with others in the market, but we have yet to see where the market goes.
Right. Maybe sticking with new networks, FedNow recently launched in the US. Could you talk about the opportunities and risks associated with FedNow?
Right. So, now we love competition. So here is another opportunity or another offer to consumers to pay potentially. It's live now, but is it really an offer for consumers at this point? It's a rail that is becoming available. The range of features are limited. The services around it are limited, so we'll have to see where that will land. If you look at different markets around the world, what government, you know, run payment systems have done to the existing set of solutions, we have, you know, chosen to compete in those markets and do that effectively. Mastercard Debit is a perfect competitor. You know, you got liability shift, you got consumer protection, you got reach, you got a brand that you can trust. In the end, that's what consumers want.
They want something they're going to rely on. They know what happens if something goes wrong. And you, merchants, what do they want? They want reach. So that's what we deliver today. FedNow doesn't deliver that today. We'll see where it goes. In the meantime, we continue to invest in our technology. I think the most overarching point, in most countries where you have these government payment systems, is the question on security. The hackers are always two steps ahead, so is the investment in cybersecurity, the fraud, the fraud-related aspects of that for consumers, where it needs to be? And here, I believe we are a leader, and that will set us apart.
I guess the FedNow is the kind of the US and developed market trend. In emerging markets, you know, we've seen, you know, Pix take off in Brazil. We've seen UPI in India.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe if you could just update us on the global state of play of how you view RTP as it relates to Mastercard's business?
So, let's just think a moment about P2P in other markets, kind of the extension of the FedNow question that you had. You take a Pix. Now, Brazil is a very big market for us. We're doing really well. We have great partners there with Itaú and Santander and so forth, and it's predominantly a credit market. So we like what we have there. This is a P2B play. Largely, Pix today, we're obviously watching it closely and see where it goes, but it's the same. We solved the e-commerce acceptance questions for Mastercard Debit, which was used to be Maestro, so that is being addressed. So we feel good about that.
Slightly different angle, underlying rails, when you think real-time payments, you know, more and more, countries are doing what the U.S. is now doing or have already been doing that. So think about faster payments in the U.K. and so forth. 2016, 2017, I'm not gonna—I promise I will not talk you through seven years, but this is when they really started to grow, and spread around the world. That's when we bought VocaLink. We said, "Okay, it's a reality." Cards is not the answer for everything, so let's just be clear, we want to be in those flows as well. We built that position, and we are now running, operating, or building software for real-time payment systems in 13 markets around the world.
It's nicely spread around the world and in terms of kind of like follow the sun kind of logic. So it's a world-spanning network, so to say. We think about how we can get to interoperability of these systems. So there's, there's a lot in this position that we have built that one can think about. For the time being, we are where we want to be. I said in the last earnings call that we will not really pursue to build in a lot more markets. We chose the ones that we're in because they have potential to scale. The focus now is on building solutions on top of that.
If you think about what we've done in the United States with our partnership with Chase on pay-by-bank solutions, you know, that is kind of a way how you bring value to these real-time payments systems, which just bring money from A to B, but how do you make money on that? Is by putting a service on top of it. So scaling the volumes in markets, which we are, and building applications and services. I gave you an example on the service opportunity cuts into a real-time payment. So still the same strategy. It matters because real-time payments are real, so we want to be there, and we will. But we will not go to smaller markets with no scale opportunity.
Makes sense. Just switching gears a little bit, can you give us an update on your strategy related to crypto, blockchain, and tell us more about Mastercard's recent developments in that area?
Right. We... Some of you might have seen this. We launched something called a Multi-Token Network not too long ago. So, you know, this is coming to a point about this whole digital assets ecosystem. It's coming together slowly. It hasn't really scaled. It hasn't really become mainstream. There's different players with different technology. We took a step back and said: What about if we bring the players together and were to say that here's a way to create some sort of interoperable system for value exchange using digital asset technology? So it's almost a replica of what we're doing on the card side. Obviously, it has nothing to do with cards, but principally, you could make that comparison. So we said, "What does it need?" It needs some business rules.
It needs, you know, kind of what a, what a global network brings today, interoperability standards. It needs compliance capability. So if you want to build using digital asset technology, the best use case on B2B payments, do you worry about compliance? No, but you can use our CipherTrace solution and so forth. So we put all of those, you know, fundamental components and building blocks into what I would describe the App Store of the digital ecosystem, and we called it the Multi-Token Network. Now, it sounds like a crazy idea, potentially, but it's actually relatively straightforward. So we invited, two weeks ago, we invited 10, 15 players in the UK for a, a day to showcase that, and see if our theory would be falling on open ears.
The theory was validated, so we're actually gonna launch that, or we're planning to launch that, later in the year, in the UK and try that with a few partners and see where this is going. I think there's tremendous potential in using digital assets to unlock a lot of innovation and growth, but principally in B2B and cross-border to start with. In the wholesale side, we see that. In the meantime, we're busy with our crypto-related services. I talked about CipherTrace acquisition compliance. I mentioned digital identity earlier. So we, you know, provide the industry with our services, and then there's, of course, the on-ramp and off-ramp of people that wanna invest in cryptocurrency, so we do that as well. So we're pretty busy. It's an area where I think we're a leader.
We have to be thoughtful about the risks associated with it. We take a pretty principled approach in regulatory compliance, currency stability, and consumer protection. That has kept us in safe waters, so I like it. We're excited about it.
Makes sense. I saved the best for last. This is effectively an AI conference this year. It's generated substantial interest over the past couple of months with investors and really all year. What is Mastercard's AI strategy, and, you know, how are you currently using AI in the business?
Right. So we've been at AI for quite a long time. There's about 125 billion transactions in our system that's not done by humans. So AI is the way to do that. That's discriminated as AI. It's machine learning. So we've been at it. It's actually a company based out of San Francisco that we bought many years ago. That is the core of our AI knowledge, and we built it out. We now have an AI garage in Delhi, and, you know, it spans around the world. It's a lot of focus on cybersecurity and keeping transactions safe. More recently, we started to use generative AI, also again, starting in the cybersecurity space, where we use GenAI to create data sets to train our machine learning models on.
Where you see the path into other products and solutions that we have is on the personalization front. I talked about that earlier. So using GenAI for personalization solutions that we bring to our customers, so they can, you know, make a better offer to you and me. That's an interesting space. So right now, when I look across the company, across our three units, our payments unit, our services unit, and the folks who deal with the new network opportunities, GenAI is cutting across, AI is cutting across. I see it as a fundamentally enabling technology, so it's not a mega hype in the company. It is something that we use, well, like electricity, if you want. There's another aspect. We always think about the ecosystem custodian role that we have. So what are the risks around it?
What is the principled approach? I gave you some principles right now that we have for crypto. We thought about it, how should this be done for AI? And we said, "Well, it's actually four." It's accountability. As a company, you should take accountability that you will use AI in a responsible way. It's about security, of course, and privacy. That, you know, goes without any explanation needed. It's about integrity. You take bias out of AI. And the final thing is about transparency. You tell your customers, and you tell the end consumer, "I'm using AI," or, "I'm not," because it's not often known. So these four principles, we put them out in the market and made a ton of sense.
Okay.
We're right on the dot.
Right on time. Well, I appreciate you being here with us. I think that is all the time we had, but thank you very much.
Thanks, Will. Thank you so much.