All right, thanks everyone for joining. This is the session with Marqeta. My name is Tien-tsin Huang . I follow the payments sector, and really excited to have Simon Khalaf here, CEO of Marqeta. We're gonna do a fireside chat. We'll take questions as well. Thank you for being here, Simon.
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Always enjoy talking to you and Michael and team. We were just talking before. Embedded finance seems like it's moving into the mainstream. I hear it a lot at industry conferences. When I'm meeting with different operating committees and boards, we're talking about fintech. That feels like it's the big theme, and when I think about embedded finance, I think about Marqeta as an enabler. I know you guys are pushing really hard into accelerated wage access, B2B, co-brand credit. We'll talk about all that. But the one thing that I get questions about, and I'll ask you, Simon, is in fintech, sometimes things get created before they're ready, before the market is ready. Do you feel like the market is ready for this embedded finance theme, based on what you're seeing, what the pipeline is like, what's happening on the ground?
I think the short answer is yes, but I do have to say we're in the early days of adoption. I mean, in Silicon Valley, I agree with you. We get the idea, right, we get the decade wrong, but I think our decade has come.
Okay.
So if you look at, like, with us, and the core three use cases, the first one is accelerated wage access. Where we see the biggest traction is for organization that have a large contingent workforce, so either, like, retailers or, like, the gig economy, but also the liquid marketplaces. So these organization are definitely looking to offer all the neobanking features and instant wage access to their contingent. So that's definitely an area where we're seeing a lot of great traction. The second one is the new generation co-brand, and I'd say we're starting. The digital brands are starting to look at the payment card as a digital product and as an engagement product, which is not that intuitive to the old folks because the card was a loyalty product.
Right.
So now that the card is a digital product, it can bring engagement, increased engagement, while reducing the cost of user acquisition or cost of traffic acquisition. So that, I think, is now, you know, starting to pick up fast. And the third one is SMB credit, and first, this is what we did not anticipate. We thought when we made the investment in credit, most of the focus of our product team was on the consumer side, but we were surprised about the demand for SMB credit.
Then if we think about it, okay, you take a step back, you look at, for example, SMBs account for about 47% of our GDP and over 50% of the employment, but when you look at the credit, that was the debt that was issued by JPMorgan Chase was $1.3 trillion last year. Only 2.6% of that went to SMBs. So there's a huge gap between what they're delivering and what they're taking, and that is translating to us seeing demand from aggregators or platforms, whether they're marketplaces or aggregators, that have great visibility into the performance of an SMB, that wanna give them the working capital and the expense management and implement in Marqeta software what they traditionally written in covenants that no one reads, put in the drawer.
So though I'd say if we look at those three, accelerated wage access, which is blending into neo-banking, as well as the new generation co-brand and the SMB credit, that's, I think, what we're seeing in terms of accelerated demand and readiness. But again, I wanna caution, we're still in the early phases of adoption. It's very, very promising, but it's early.
So when you talk about next generation co-brand, I've heard you talk about this before, and it's very different than how we grew up. So you're thinking like the YouTubes, the TikToks, those kind of engagement. Can you just elaborate on that?
Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, if you look at... I mean, I don't come from the payment industry-
... and I think this is a good thing-
Yeah
- because a lot of folks in payments overcomplicate things, but it's okay. I mean, if you look at when you are in the direct-to-consumer business, you look at two metrics. One is daily active users, and the other one is ARPDAU, which is average revenue per daily active users. If you're advertising sponsored, like the sessions, which is the time the visits within the day of that DAU matter a lot. The most addictive product on the market today is TikTok, okay? Adjusted to the U.S. population reach, a consumer reaches to you TikTok 2.1 times a day. But a payment card, people reach out to a payment card 2.2 times a day.
So it is the most addictive product on the market today invented by humankind. Excellent. Used to be a piece of plastic. It cannot engage you, can't send you an SMS, can't send you an email, can't even change its color. Now, it's a digital product. It's the most engaging product ever invented. So every digital brand that has direct-to-consumer practices or ambitions is looking at this and say, "Hang on just a second. This is more addictive than SMS, more addictive than push notification, more addictive than email, and I wanna use it as an engagement hook." And that's, that's, I think, what we're gonna see, the, the co-brand happen. And the second one is all the previous co-brands had this 1.5% cashback.... So which one are you gonna use? Whatever, the one that I have in my pocket.
But if you look at the Marqeta platform, it has the ability to issue dynamic rewards to change consumer behavior. So I don't have to give you 1.5% cashback. I might have to give you 10% on this deal 'cause it's much better, and then the second one, I give you nothing. So, so the ability to do dynamic rewards do not just intercept consumer behavior, but they can alter consumer behavior. So that's why I think our platform is kinda like it's been built for this.
Yeah, so let's dig into that. I know as much as I'm going to these conferences, I know a lot of others are, and they're touting their embedded finance capabilities. Again, while I think about Marqeta as being early with this, building out that category, others are building it out as well. So what's the edge that Marqeta has?
Sure.
Do you see multiple providers going after this market and succeeding?
Well, I mean, the embedded finance market is in trillions, so even if we don't have competition today, we will. So by the way, like, my frame of reference is in embedded finance, you have effectively three core players. First, you have the issuers, like us, that are focused on a brilliant consumer experience. Then you have acquirers, modern acquirers, that are focused on the merchant experience, and you have the network, so whether it's Visa or Mastercard.
... that are focused on the money movement experience. All of us have a symbiotic relationship to lift this ecosystem, and we kinda, like, feed off each other, but all of us are moving this up. And we get asked that a lot. Is gonna be synergies here and there? I don't think so. I mean, the three of us are gonna work hard in order to make embedded finance work in a very symbiotic way.
Okay, good. So let's, let's drill down on some, a few things. I do wanna talk about the network side of the equation-
Sure
... with some of the new products we talked about. Before we do that, let's do credit, 'cause I get a lot of questions on credit. Newer opportunity from Marqeta. You've had a couple of wins there. Give us an update on what's happening. How are you differentiated there from a credit-
Sure
... perspective product?
Yeah. I mean, let me talk about our broader differentiation within the embedded finance, and then we'll get to-
Let's do it.
... credit. Yeah. So if you look at, like, why does Marqeta win? I always think about it. The number one thing is the breadth of our platform. We can do debit, we can do BNPL, we can do credit. So we cover the bases from a lending perspective. We have a very strong program management layer. So because a lot of the embedded finance players don't wanna deal with the regulatory issues.
Like, when you talk to them about Reg Z and Reg E, it's just two letters of the alphabet.
Right? To us, it's an entire practice. So, we have a program management layer that is designed for embedded finance. They just don't need to understand any of it. We take care of it. And then the second one is the scale we operate at. Some of the digital brands we're talking to have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of users, right?
They need to operate at the scale we operate at. They cannot go with, with somebody that's not gonna operate that. And then the last but not least, we have economies of scale. Like, when you look at the consumer side of the house, there's disputes, there's chargebacks, there's customer service. I mean, we've been building the stack for a long time. We've got AI, we've got, we've got all kinds of... We've got IVRs, we've got chatbots, we've got all of these. So I think we, we have an advantage over that. Now, moving to credit, like, like I said, we are... When we made the acquisition, we had the consumer credit in mind, but we've gotten a lot of demand from the SMB side.
Yeah.
So we have, we announced 2, 2 customers, AffiniPay and ITS, that are focused on effectively SMB credit and travel, and we're very focused on launching those. The pipeline is growing very fast, so we're being selective. So, and let me be clear what selective... It's not that we're not taking, customers. We're focused on, I'd say, 2, 2 markets that we're very excited about. The first one is the co-brand, and I'd say digital native, digital brands, and the second one is the SMB credit through an aggregator or a marketplace.
Right.
That's the area of focus, I'd say, for us over the next 12 month, and there's plenty of opportunities around that.
Okay. So is this more... I'm curious, just to build on that, is it experimental discovery mode for a lot of these players that you're describing on both of those sides? Are they ready to launch something at scale? Tell us how, how that might mature.
Yeah. I mean, these are not customers that are building a product and wishing it good luck.
Okay.
Right? They have the audience. They have the SMBs. They've aggregated them. I mean, just to give you a number, like, look at Square, they've issued more small business loan than JPMorgan Chase last quarter. I think it's $1.2, compared to $1.13, right? So they have restaurants. It's not that if we offer credit through them or when we offer credit through them, they're gonna have to recruit restaurants.
So they have 'em. So I'd say that that will move very fast. I don't believe that's gonna be a long, long customer recruitment. So I, I'd say they are ready.
Okay, good. So before we talk about some of the customers-
Sure
... and the deals, I did wanna make sure up front I ask you, there's so much change in the market, Simon. Visa last week launched a bunch of different products. One of them was Flex Credentials, which is almost like a carousel or rotation around funding, which is fun. But there's been a lot of questions from investors around, "Okay, how do you actually enable it? How do you get into the market? Who are the providers that do that?" Of course, we thought of Marqeta. So can you quickly talk about what Flex Credentials is, and will Marqeta play a role in its development?
Yeah, absolutely. We have been very involved, and we are playing, and will continue to play a very active role in this. This is a big step in the ecosystem. This is not a small step.
Okay.
Let me explain why. What this enables, I guess, consumers and merchants or the ecosystem to do, is separate the loan from a payment card.
So the card technically becomes the wallet, but let's table that analogy. So it allows consumers to have ultimate choice on a transaction-by-transaction level. So you have one payment card and you say, "Oh, for the banana and orange juice, I'm going to pay in debit. And hey-
... for the whatever, for this new drill that I'm going to buy, it's going to be credit. So without having to swap cards or carry multiple cards. So that is kind of like the, what the consumer behavior is going to be like. However, so this use case, which is the debit/buy now, pay later at the hands of the consumer, is something we have innovated and honestly launched on our own with our buy now, pay later customers, like Affirm and many others. And that use case, over the last year, has grown 7x for us. 7x, not 7%, 7x from... And the run rate right now, running through those pipes, is over $4 billion in annual spend. So we have great product market fit. Okay?
Now, what the Visa announcement allows us to do is, now that we've demonstrated that this construct work, we can take it mainstream. We can take it to scale, meaning we can attach buy now, pay later to any debit card, not just the debit card issued by Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, and it goes on and on. So Marqeta becomes the distribution channel for our partners, and it moves away the value addition from the acquiring side to the issuing side. It cleans up the clutter at the checkout.
Because right now, go to checkout and you see checkout by Affirm, checkout by Klarna, checkout by whatever, checkout by PayPal, checkout by Apple. And what happens? The consumer will pick the brand they're most familiar with. They click on Apple. So the, now there's going to be one checkout button, which everybody has talked about, right? But the power is in the hand of the consumer, which is something that, that is very pretty. And to Marqeta, this is a big, big development because we will be able to give, A, the consumer the choice, we'll be able to distribute buy now, pay later to any debit card. So you've expanded the market beautifully for us. And last but not least, all these buy now, pay later folks don't have to go merchant by merchant, especially with a long tail, and, and try to recruitment.
They just, they just go through us as a distribution partner.
The key, Simon, is you've already done this at scale, and you've already built this out-
Yes
... from a debit plus perspective and some of these BNPL players, correct?
Yes, and I mean, I'll defer to Visa to announce the exact-
Sure
... date they're going with to market, but we are ready. We've been working on this for a year with them.
Okay. No, it's exciting. It sounded like a-
Yeah
... a big breakthrough. It kind of reminded me a little bit, right? A lot of the hard work up front got done with Apple Pay, and then you replicate that, and you've seen it with Google Pay, Samsung Pay.
That's right. That's right.
This seems like with you, you're at the beginning, you solved all the hard work up front, and now it's going to get expanded and-
That's right
... exposed to others.
That's right.
Okay. We'll ask Visa tomorrow. Stay tuned, everybody. So let's do some of the deal activity. I think the one that stood out to us in the first quarter. I know you, you announced that intra-quarter was with Rain on the human capital management side-
... the payroll side. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about that? Why did you choose to work with Rain and vice versa, and why is that one so unique from a partnership perspective?
Sure, yeah. I mean, we've mentioned multiple times, the accelerated wage access or instant wage access is an important space for us. We've publicly talked about Uber, we've publicly talked about Walmart. So, so, for us to broaden the solution, we have to go through multiple distribution channels. So the market is a $2 trillion market, and there's concentration. There's concentration at the top, there's a fat middle market, and then there's a long tail. So, the labor marketplaces is a great distribution channel for us.
But for the others, in which you do have folks that are W-2 employees versus 1099 employees, right? You have to actually get into the how much people are going to be paid and when, not just the money transfer part, which Marqeta handles beautifully. So Rain allows us to do so because they are managing the time sheet effectively of that labor. And their focus is on the franchisees, not labor marketplaces or the very high-end retailers, or warehousing, or B2B, so on and so forth. So that opens up a big market for us. To Rain, they also get a good distribution partner. I mean, we've built a sales organization, they know how to call on the enterprise, and we're having those conversations.
When the first thing that comes, they ask, "Can you do our payroll for us?" I'm like: No, we're not a payroll provider. We only move the money.
So we can bring Rain into the account and offer a bigger, bigger solution.
Okay. So should we expect more deals like this, Simon? Is this the beginning of something new?
Yeah. I mean, we already work with ISVs.
Yeah.
Like I'd say, we're working with Wagestream in the U.K. around that. So there's quite a few of those that are regional players that we'll work with.
... Okay. Yeah, no, 'cause I think the payroll side is interesting. I know we get a lot of questions around Walmart and whatnot, but it feels like it's well understood, this opportunity, no? Or-
It is, it is, it is. It is, absolutely. I mean, for contingent workforce, it's great. For W-2 workforce, Rain gives us a clean answer.
Okay, good. So really, let's, we've a few more topics I wanna hit upon, but let's do expense management. We have a lot of expense management companies-
That's right
... at the conference here. That's accelerating for you, and I think in the first quarter, you've been gaining share at some of your customers. We've been hearing more and more, I call it load management-
... where you'll have more than one provider that's doing virtual card processing for expense management. How do you gain share at an account beyond price? What else is the vendor looking for?
Yeah. I'd say that, you know, we started working with those highly innovative expense management companies around real-time spend management and all the controls that you can put on the Marqeta, Marqeta platform, and that has gone really well. And where we have seen kinda like the load balancing is on the virtual one-time usage of that, mainly in bill payment-
... more than it is a consumer taking a corporate card and spending. But what we've seen lately, and it's reflected in our Q1, is a lot of the expense management customers that started distributing, as they, the load started growing and realizing, well, hang on, at scale, life is not that easy compared to when you were starting. So they're coming back to Marqeta, I'd say, for 2-3 reasons. I mean, the first one is service. This is not easy. Like, so the customer service that Marqeta provides is enterprise quality, versus what others offer to long-tail customers. So if you're starting, you might distribute, but as you grow, you have to come back to great customer service. The second one is credit. Like, there is a nice blend. All these folks have an expense management solution.
They wanna provide working capital in elastic fashion, and they wanna provide more financial services. The breadth of the Marqeta platform helps them do that and reduce the cost. The third thing, which is international expansion, like when these guys go sell to larger organization that has a distributed workforce, well, guess what? That distributed workforce is not in the United States, and they need those corporate cards. So they came back to Marqeta and said, "Can you guys light me up in those country?" I'm like, "Absolutely!" And then they begged the question: "Well, why the hell then am I distributing this?" So they're coming back to us. So we are very happy with where we stand in this market.
Okay, good. I mean, just thinking about some of the hot markets you've been in, expense management, BNPL, on-demand delivery, we've seen ups and downs, at least reflected in the stock prices. But your bookings have been strong, and it sounds like things are running a little bit ahead of plan. How healthy would you say your core end markets are?
On the booking side, as we talked about, we are ahead of plan, and the pipeline is growing faster than our bookings, which is a very good thing. So we're not draining the pipeline to make the quarter. And I'd say there's many reasons for that. The first one is, as we tackle the embedded finance market, by definition, they're bigger players.
Sure.
So the numbers are significantly higher. The second one, the expansions with our customers is now occurring at a faster pace. I, I hate to call it the resurgence of fintech, but there are some fintechs that have now scaled, and I think that the dry spell or whatever last year is helping them because the winners, the winners are winning more.
So, and they're expanding with us, either selling more products, or expanding in other countries. And then, we have, I'd say, the core use cases that we have re-enabled that is fueling our pipeline as well. So from a bookings perspective, again, it's a win rate from a bigger pipeline, and it's looking very healthy.
Yeah. Well, that's consistent. You, you said you're going after enterprises.
Sure.
At Investor Day, you said you were moving away from the VC-backed players, which makes sense, and now you've got enterprise, you have marketplace. So could we expect larger deals in general, and the trade-off could be slower implementations? How should we evaluate that?
Yeah. We intentionally do not wanna trade a large number with a slower implementation cycle.
Okay.
Right? So the good thing on the enterprise side is we are the program manager. So if you look at some of the deals that we've closed in fintech, that took some time, we were not the program manager. So they had the relationship with the banks themselves. Things are slow. Banks are not the fastest-moving organizations. So by us being the program manager, it actually makes the programs go smoother, if not even faster. So we're not trading that. So the answer is, yes, they are gonna be a bigger deal, but the... We, and we monitor this. The average and the median of the deployment cycles are coming down by about 11% year-over-year. So while we've broadened the pipe, we haven't, we haven't compromised the deployment time.
Okay, good. So I know also enterprises are gonna be a lot more careful around risk management, and I think compliance appears to be an asset for you because you've fought through that as you scaled up a lot of big players, including Cash App and Block. So is that a differentiator in your mind, Simon?
Yeah, yeah.
Is there more to do on the compliance side?
Absolutely. No, no, absolutely. I mean, I always look at expertise and scale. Mm-hmm. So we can do it better, and we can do it cheaper. So one is like, okay, so why? One is the investment we have put in. We have spent in this platform. So if you look at it on the dispute side, whether you're doing Reg E or you're doing Reg Z. So Reg Z is for credit, Reg E is for debit. You have to put an IVR, you have to program it for telephony, you have to build a chatbot, you have to understand the intent of the consumer, you have to build a queuing management system, you have to submit to the network, you... And you have to track all these and instrument it to make sure the consumers are happy. Well, guess what? We've built that.
So, that is not easy work. Same thing with banking, with banking secrecy, anti-money laundering, putting that machinery together, sampling it against, lists, so on and so forth, that's all been done. So, and the scale we operate at, our unit economic is significantly better than what each customer can get on their own. So in addition to the unit economics, you've got multiple expertise that we can help them. So if somebody wants to do debit, money movement, credit, BNPL, one program management layer, and I think that's a huge differentiator for us.
When you're competing against some of your peers on the compliance side, is it very observable for your clients as they're making decisions on the, on the compliance front?
They are. No, absolutely. And I'd say that some of the fintech players, they're very smart, and they built it on their own for a specific program. They did not realize that as they wanna branch out of the program they have established, they have to kind of rebuild it. So, I mean, at the end of the day, every fintech wants to become a bank, so without the license, but offer banking services. And it's not that they stopped and thought, "Hmm, I'm gonna do consumer, business, commercial, the lending, whatever, so let me start by building this great program management layer and start building services underneath it." No, they said, "Look, I'm gonna do BNPL.
I'm gonna have great program management for that." But then they get into the revolver and say, "Hmm, that's gonna be harder." So there's no question that the program management layer and the investment we've made have become great competitive differentiators for us.
Sure. And I'm sure, you know, servicing Block has helped you get there and, and made you better, in terms of the demands and the growth that they've seen. Do you expect the concentration on Block here to evolve in a big way? I know they've probably have some products coming. I'm gonna ask Jack about that tomorrow, at lunch. So outlook on the concentration front with Block.
Well, in Q1-
... it was below 50%, 49%, and gross profit, few points lower.
Right.
Our customers outside Block are growing faster. Our top 10 customers grew over 30%, year-over-year, outside Block. Now, having said that, as Mike mentioned multiple times, there are still tremendous opportunities within the Block ecosystem. I'd say, on Cash App specifically, only 40% of their monthly actives have a card, so with only 40% penetrated, only 10% of them have direct deposit, and that's something they publicly said they wanna work on.
Yeah.
So that will increase the inflows and hence the outflows. And you have they're integrating Afterpay, which is powered by Marqeta, into Cash App, which is powered by Marqeta, and that will create again, more purchasing power to the Cash App consumers, and that will translate to more revenue for Marqeta. And then you have their focus on operational efficiencies, and there's stuff we can do for them that is probably cheaper than they can do it on their own because of our economy of scale. So while we're gonna work hard to grow everything else, we have to be realistic that there's tremendous opportunities in front of Block and hence in front of us.
Good. Yeah, no, I'm eager to see what both of y'all develop together. I know we're winding out of time here. Let me get through a few more. So yeah, on the call you talked about... Let's talk about Jason Gardner.
Sure.
Founder of the company. I always respected Jason. He stepped down as Executive Chairman. He'll take a Director role from here. Can you tell us why the change, why now, and, and how are you gonna be working with him going forward?
Yeah, sure. I mean, people take an exec chairmanship position for an average of 18 months, and he's at the 18-month. So I think he's comfortable with the team that we have now, and we don't need kind of like executive chairman oversight. Jason wants to go back to innovation, and we'd love to have him in this capacity. So we have an innovation committee on the board that he will be involved in. And the other thing he's done also, he has the company's, the company's, you know, value in mind, and he's downgraded some of his Class B shares, so that we can actually buy back the stock without him tripping over the 50% voting. So he's done that with that transition.
Okay, good. No, I, I figured I'd ask. Hope you understand why.
Of course, of course.
Just a few more, and I know folks have asked questions, but I have a few more that people wanna make sure that I ask.
Sure.
Just on the large bank front. I know it's further out in terms of opportunity, but is this a focus for you at all, Simon, in terms of working with larger banks, especially with some of the innovation that's coming out?
Not, not immediately. We're realistic. I mean, we are invited to RFPs, we have conversations. But, like, if and when there will be movement, we believe it will be on the commercial side, not yet on the consumer side, because larger banks are starting to feel the pain of the new generation expense management players. So it would probably happen on the commercial side.
Okay, good. You did announce a $200 million buyback on top of what you had. So the, the typical capital allocation, boring question, but it is important here, the buyback versus M&A. I know the power deal has built... helped you build out credit. What might you do here going ahead? How do you prioritize buyback versus M&A?
Yeah, I mean, Mike has mentioned multiple times, we're not gonna be systematic buyers. We believe our stock is way underpriced, so we are taking out stock when it is low. We can talk about why, but that's what the situation is, what it is. In terms of an M&A, look, we're fully stacked. We are-
Yeah
... We’re very happy with the technology we have, and given the size of what I call the medium and long-term pipeline, we think from an organic perspective, we can deliver on it. And also, now that we have expanded and we announced Poland, we now have access to a lower-cost labor market for the risk management as well as engineering. We do believe that organic is the way we’re gonna go over the next year or two to 24 months.
Okay, good. I mean, market, I think once you move into the second half of the year, you move beyond some of these comparison issues.
Yeah.
It's attractive growth, of course, 20-25%+, by a lot of people's models. What do you think... You've been meeting with investors, Simon, you and Mike have been meeting with a lot of investors. What do you think is underappreciated at this point that you would like to underline?
I think we hear three things. First, they all appreciate the progress we made. They're giving us credit for that. But I think the three things they're concerned about, the first one is the comp- our story is complicated. Exactly as you mentioned, in Q3, our story will be simple.
Yeah.
As in like we've lapped, you know, the, all the contract renegotiating of about 80% of our volume. And we, going forward, we're gonna simplify our business, just look as total processing volume and gross profit take rate, and that will tell you what our, what our value that is being created is. The second one, are, are we a single trick pony? Which is code name for Block concentration. I think we've demonstrated that our growth is across many use cases, and also the growth outside Block is, even if Block's still growing fast, we, is now is, is higher than Block. And then the third thing they keep, asking about, is there any consolidation or synergies between acquiring and, and, and issuing-
Right
... and hence, margin compression? I don't believe now that we've been in the market for so long, the acquirers are focused on the merchants. We're focused on the consumer, and then those have kinda like opposing interests. I always say, "If you rob Peter to pay Paul one day, the second day, you rob Paul to pay Peter, you lose both Peter and Paul." So that's not gonna happen. So, and, and the issuing side has a lot more complexity than acquiring, so the trend towards commoditization is not gonna happen.
Okay.
So I think we feel good about the prospects.
Okay, good. No, thanks for going through all that.
Sure.
I know we're out of time, but let me maybe just close out asking you, what are you excited about? We talked a lot about different things, embedded finance, flex credentials, that's a breakthrough thing from a Visa perspective. What, what are you excited about that you think we should go back and study when we get back to our desk?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, there's, like I said, there's trillions of dollars everywhere you look, but you cannot look everywhere. The area that we're spending a lot of time on, and we're getting a lot of interest on, is the conversions of payment and commerce.
Yeah.
Like, if you put everything in perspective, the major digital platforms, and I was one of them-
... well, we, we spent over $500 billion, $500 billion in R&D to make people click on an ad. Okay? A lot of AI, a lot of GenAI, way before the GenAI. Now, you take that and you apply that, that technology into the payment space. Now that a card is, is a digital product, we can do wonders to streamline the funnel, all the way from performance marketing, to, to sales, and into loyalty. That is a massive opportunity for our ecosystem, not just us. So we're very, very excited about, about that.
Great. We should end it there. Simon, always great to talk to you.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Appreciate the time, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.