Next up, we're excited to have Ryan McInerney, who's the CEO of Visa joining us today. Ryan obviously just assumed the role of CEO last month, but he's been with Visa since 2013, quite a long time. Prior to being CEO, he was the President and responsible for Visa's global businesses. Congratulations on your new role, Ryan, and thank you for being with us.
Thanks, Sanjay. Great to be here.
Maybe we start at a high level. You've been with Visa for a decade now. You're taking on the role of CEO. What are some of the initiatives that you're most excited about? At a high level, what are some of the short-term and long-term goals that you have for Visa, you know, going forward?
aving me. Thanks for being here. I have been at the firm for a decade, and I've never been more excited about the opportunities in front of us. We have a strategy and a management team and a set of capabilities that we feel is second to none, and we have enormous opportunities ahead of us all around the world. The goals that we set for ourselves as a leadership team up and down the organization are really rooted in three things. The first is how do we maximize shareholder value? The second is how do we absolutely delight our clients? We are maniacal about our clients. We wake up every morning thinking about what we can do to help our clients be successful. The third thing is how do we innovate
How do we continue to innovate and deliver the type of capabilities, services, and products that make us the best way to pay and be paid in every country that we do business around the world. As you might imagine, having been our president for a decade, I'm very, very vested in our strategy. My fingerprints are all over our strategy. We feel that our strategy is focused on the right things. You might have heard on our last earnings call, I talked about the fact that we've reorganized the company to directly reflect our strategy. I have three well-seasoned, well-regarded internally and by our clients, leaders who are responsible for our consumer payments franchise, our new money movement flows business unit, and our value-added services business unit reporting directly to me.
They have management teams, full stack product and engineering teams, go-to-market teams all around the world that are doing everything they can to deliver against that strategy. You know, the opportunity, as I said, is enormous. The consumer payments business remains a significant opportunity. Enormous amounts of cash and check that continue to be used all around the world. The new flows opportunity is 10 x that in terms of TAM. We believe we have a remarkable set of products and capabilities and solutions to go after that. You know, our value-added services business is really humming. It's a great way for us to embed ourselves with our clients, to help our clients grow their business and, as a result, you know, view us even more importantly, hopefully, as their most important partner. We're excited about it.
We believe, deeply in the strategy, and it's all about how do we deliver against it.
I guess over the short run, you're having to deal with this choppiness in the economic backdrop. I'm just curious sort of if you are seeing anything, you know, inside the cohorts of consumers and businesses you have and how you're managing the business for what could be a choppy backdrop.
I don't mean to disappoint you, but when we look at our data around the world globally, by country, by product, by consumer segment, it is remarkably stable.
Mm.
I'm sorry to disappoint you on that. It is. I mean, if you look almost for the last year or so for almost four quarters, globally, if you index our spending volume to three years ago, it's been running in the mid-140s, you know. Up more than 40% from three years ago. Just if you look at those lines, they're pretty flat. Resilient, stable, consistent, that's what we're seeing in our data around the world.
When you think about, just sort of. Is there any contrast between the geographies like U.S. versus Europe versus Asia? Obviously Asia, you might have a travel rebound. Just maybe talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, sure. I'll just go around the horn and give you the numbers as we move around the world. As I told you, overall payment volume for the last almost four quarters, mid-140s, pretty consistently. If you just go back and look at our last fiscal quarter, we reported global volume, if you exclude China and Russia, was 146% of three years ago, up 12% year-over-year. You break that first into the U.S. versus the rest of the world, the U.S. was 144%. The rest of the world, again, excluding China and Russia, was 147%.
Mm-hmm
... of three years ago. Pretty balanced when you index it. This is all constant dollar numbers. The U.S. was up 9%. The rest of the world was up 15%. Again, indexed to three years ago, almost the same thing. When you get outside the U.S., if you look at Latin America and MEA, those two regions indexed to three years ago for us were at about 200%. Lots of cash conversion. We're also winning share in a bunch of those markets. Year-over-year, those markets were up 25%. Up 25%, 200% indexed to three years ago. If you look at Asia, you know, you mentioned the starting to see the travel emerge in Asia.
Asia, excluding China, was up 134% versus three years ago, 16% year-over-year. Europe was up 134% versus three years ago or up 10% year-over-year. If you look at Europe outside of the U.K., we had some share loss in the U.K. If you look outside of the U.K., the rest of Europe, that's 171% of three y ears ago, up 28% year-over-year.
Mm-hmm.
Clearly some differences as you look around the world, but big picture, all those markets, very healthy spending...
Very strong.
... very strong spending. You know, relatively consistent, resilient performance around the world.
That's great. Obviously, cross-border is a big revenue line for you guys. Maybe you could just talk about how different cross-border is today versus maybe pre-pandemic, if there's been any change given the pandemic. Obviously, there's been a lot of pent-up demand. How you see that business sort of managing itself through if there's a cycle. You know, do you typically see a slowdown in cross-border or do you think demand might help offset that? Maybe just talk about that.
Sure. cross-border also doing very healthy, up 132% index to three years ago, up 5 points or so last quarter. Continuing to see some good, consistent improvement in that business. listen, every recession's different, every downturn's different, every cycle's different, and it's certainly hard to predict what's gonna happen with cross-border. having said that, one of the things that is different about the cross-border business today versus pre-pandemic, is the relative weight of the e-commerce cross-border business. as more sellers around the world have connected to the Visa network, as more buyers around the world are buying things internationally outside of their home country, we've seen the percent of cross-border that comes from e-commerce as opposed to travel grow.
Before the pandemic, it was about a third of our cross-border business. You know, as we sit here today, it's more than 40% of our cross-border business. I would expect, you know, there's a lot more everyday shopping that happens there, a lot more retail purchases, maybe less correlated with what happens with global travel around the world. That might be one difference going forward. The other thing I would say is, you know, as we look forward in the very near future, three, six, nine months out, there's a lot of pent-up travel demand.
Mm-hmm.
Even in some parts of the world, if there is a downturn, if there is recession, you know, recession in different countries around the world, you know, it's quite possible people are gonna still wanna travel. It's quite possible both consumers and businesses are gonna wanna travel, I would say more than they otherwise might in a normal downturn if we hadn't just come out of a global pandemic.
Yeah. How important is China to the cross-border rebound?
I think we shared some of the numbers on the last call. You know, it's a relatively small portion of overall cross-border around the world. You know, we are excited to hopefully see, you know, China rebound. As everybody knows, the borders have opened, you know, there's still a lot of infrastructure that has to happen for travel in and out of China to get back to where it was pre-pandemic. You gotta get planes, gates, seats, visas, you know, all the stuff that, you know, the rest of the world has gotten close to back, having a well-oiled travel system. It's gonna take three, six , maybe nine months before we really start to see meaningful travel in and out of China.
That's how you guys contemplated it in your thoughts for the targets that you've set for the year?
Yeah. The guidance and the forecast that we've given for the year are consistent with all that.
Okay, perfect. You talked about value-added services being, you know, quite strong and a remarkable growth story. Maybe you could just talk about which products inside of value-added services have resonated the most and where you see, you know, the future growth potential there?
Yeah, sure. Our value-added services business has become a very important part of how we serve clients and the value that clients see from Visa. It's also become a big business for us. Last quarter, it was $1.7 billion in revenue for us. It grew 20% year-over-year. Important for our clients, growing and diversifying revenue for Visa. We're very excited about both the strategy and the businesses. Maybe what I'll do is I'll just walk through how we run value-added services as a company. We have five value-added services business units. Each one of those businesses has an executive who's in charge of that business, a management team, you know, a full stack, engineering team, product team, go-to-market team, sales teams.
You know, they're gold on their ability to drive sales and serve our clients all around the world. The first of those businesses is our issuer solutions, value-added services business unit. As the name implies, what we do in that business is provide products and services that help our issuer partners better serve their clients. You know, example of the service that we provide in that business is DPS, which is the preeminent issuer processing platform here in the U.S. That's an example.
Mm-hmm.
There's a wide array of products and services that we deliver to our issuers. We provide card controls, which have been a business, a product that's been growing quite swiftly in that business, so that our issuers, through a single API, can enable their Visa cardholders in their banking app to turn on or off their card or turn it on or off for certain merchant categories or, you know, things like that. We also provide card benefits, lounge benefits, travel benefits that, again, our issuer partners provide their clients. That's the first business. Second business is our kind of acceptance solutions business, where we work with acquirers to help our acquirer partners and ultimately their end merchant partners with their business.
Mm-hmm.
You know, a great platform that we talk a lot about in that business is CyberSource. CyberSource, if you go back several years ago, started as an e-commerce gateway. We have invested in that product tech stack to evolve that into a true omnicommerce global acquirer and merchant solution platform that we deliver both directly to merchants around the world, but increasingly through our acquirer partners. Helping acquirer partners compete in what's become the arms race of the acquiring business around the world. That's an example. Another example is Verifi. We've had a lot of success recently growing the Verifi business. Verifi is a company we bought a few years ago that essentially creates a direct connection between merchants and issuers to help resolve disputes much more quickly and much less expensively.
Nobody likes disputes. Disputes, cardholders don't like 'em, banks don't like 'em, merchants don't like 'em. They take time. On our system, you know, disputes can take two, three, four weeks to get resolved.
Mm-hmm.
Nobody's happy through that process. It's expensive. What Verifi did is they created a data payload where an issuer can connect and communicate with a merchant in real time, provide each other with information, and resolve the dispute in seconds.
Mm-hmm
... literally seconds. When we bought that company, they were having to go kind of convince issuers and merchants to directly integrate, use their APIs. This is a good example of why M&A and us buying a company can create incremental value. What we did is we took their data payload, their system, their processes, and we embedded it directly into our acquirers so that issuers and merchants don't have to go do all that work with Verifi. That's done two t hings. That's allowed us to scale the business. I think we grew cases 40% last quarter, so it's growing quite quickly. We've also been able to scale it globally. I think a third of those cases are now outside of the U.S., and historically had been a U.S. business.
That's an example of acceptance solutions. A third business unit for us is our risk and identity solutions. Visa Advanced Authorization's a great example of a product and service in that business where we're able to score in milliseconds hundreds of different data elements that help our issuers have more confidence of whether you are who you are, and therefore to approve that transaction and reduce fraud that might come with it. Our fourth business unit is our advisory services business, so consulting, analytics, data. We work in our offices with our clients, issuers, merchants, and acquirers around the world on all the things that are important to them.
Mm.
Marketing, customer segmentation, product fraud, strategy. We did a whole bunch of work in the last couple quarters with our clients on how to activate our FIFA assets, given the World Cup was happening, and put those to work. Finally, our fifth business unit is our open banking business unit. That's the most nascent of all five. We acquired Tink, and that's kinda the anchor of that business. You know, we're excited about the potential of that business. Huge, important, growing, strategically important set of businesses for us that we're operating at scale around the world.
Yeah. I'd love to just dig in a little bit to Tink. I mean, where are you with the integration process? Maybe you could just talk about the opportunity for open banking over sort of the intermediate to long term.
Yeah, thanks. We're very excited about Tink. Just for those of you that may not be as familiar with Tink is the preeminent open banking platform in Europe. Europe is ground zero for open banking around the world. Tink has done a great job scaling their business. They are connected to the better part of 3,400 financial institutions in Europe. 10,000 developers are on their platform. They have connected to 250 million customers in Europe, so it is an at-scale preeminent open banking platform in Europe. We have onboarded marquee clients, both fintechs like Revolut or Adyen, but also traditional financial institutions like BNP and ABN AMRO and many, many, many others. It's early days in open banking, no doubt about it. We believe in the power of open banking.
We believe in the power of empowering consumers and small businesses with their data to improve their lives. At the core, open banking is a network business. I mean, it's about connecting financial institutions, developers, and consumers in a country regionally and globally and running an at-scale, real-time, resilient network to enable those participants to use that data to empower their lives. You know, that's what we do. We do it with financial information. Now we do it with customers' information. So we believe that that is powerful on its own, but.
Mm-hmm
... we also believe that it's a powerful component of our network of networks strategy. Our ability to kind of enable our network of networks to use that information in real time for customer authentication, for, you know, direct account to account payments, for. It's... To the core of your question, Sanjay, it's early days, but we believe in the future, and we're continuing to invest in the future as part of our Tink platform.
Yeah. We've seen some banks launch certain initiatives around open banking, even in the United States. I mean, are you getting a lot of interest from banks wanting to do something like that?
We're getting a lot of interest, from banks, in Europe and around the world. I mean, they also believe and see that it's early days. The leading edge banks wanna be on the front end of this. They wanna be using the power of the data to help, you know, improve the lives of their customers.
Right. Just one more on value-added services as a whole. As we think about, you know, cycles and that kind of thing, how defensive is that model? I mean, do you feel like it's a pretty defensive revenue stream?
I don't like to use the word defensive about it-
Recurring
... in business. You know, listen, the truth is, in our core business, we wake up every day and have to compete for that business. We have to have the best people, the best products, the best platform, the best brand. And increasingly every day, as you know better than anyone, there's more competitors that are in our client's office trying to win that business. That's true in our core business. That's true in our value-added services businesses. Having said that, we feel really strong about the future of that business for a few reasons. One is we have great client relationships. Because we've invested for decades in the partnerships that we have with our clients, they trust us. They wanna know from us what are the solutions on risk, on identity, on open banking, that we have.
You know, we have a data set that we're able to put to work that is second to none. You know, we have more data, we have more comprehensive global data than I think really any player on the planet that we're able to put to work together for our clients. You know, what we saw through the recent kind of COVID downturns is there's real benefits to having a portfolio of value-added services. While some of the travel benefits that we deliver in our issuer business suffered during the pandemic, e-commerce was booming. Merchants and acquirers needed help with fraud. They needed help from our CyberSource platform to enable omni-channel. Then, you know, as e-commerce started to moderate, you know, whatever, several quarters ago, travel came back.
Mm.
You know, our issuers needed help again with travel benefits. There is a portfolio benefit as well to the mix of service that we provide to our partners around the world.
Perfect. Maybe we shift gears, talk about Visa Direct. It's obviously grown quite nicely to become roughly mid-single digits percentage of your total transactions. As we think about the evolution of use cases, away from sort of P2P to more sophisticated areas like cross-border remittances, where are we in that evolution? Maybe you could help us think about how meaningfully the economic impact could be as we go up that curve.
Sure. Before I answer your question directly, let me take a step back and just talk about Visa Direct. Visa Direct is a great example of innovation and how we scale innovation at Visa. You go back several years ago, what happened is you had a group of engineers and product managers in a conference room on a whiteboard, and they came up with an idea. The idea was, what if we reverse the transaction? Like, We normally pull money. What if we just pushed money on the Visa network?
You know, that turned into a MVP, and they eventually got with the sales team, and they met with a client and said, "Well, if we could do this for you, could you use it to do A, B, and C?" The client said, "Yeah, that would be interesting." That started to scale into account-to-account Visa Direct, which we were talking about regularly several years ago, sending money from one Visa card to another Visa card. We enabled the ability to gateway to other card networks. We added the capability to push money from a card to a bank account, both domestically and around the world. We added recently the ability to push money to any one of the digital wallets around the world, especially in Asia.
As we sit here, Visa Direct is, in my opinion, the largest at-scale money movement network on the planet, with the ability to reach 5 billion endpoints. Not only is it the largest in terms of scale, it's the highest quality transaction. That gets to the end of your question, Sanjay, around our partners and our clients are willing to pay a premium for a high-quality transaction.
Mm-hmm.
Now in terms of use cases that you asked about, we've now scaled to 60 different use cases around the world. We've got 2,000 programs that we're now operating around the world. We work with enablers to distribute the Visa Direct capability. We've got 500 enablers around the world that are actively selling that high-quality transaction to their clients. You know, you asked about, like, the cross-border side of the business and where does it go from here. First of all, the yields on Visa Direct, it's a good yielding product. As we're able to scale it into cross-border, it becomes an even better yielding product.
Mm-hmm.
We see the cross-border opportunity in really two different ways for Visa Direct. The first is remittances, where remittance is a huge business around the world, $800 billion a year. There's 800 million people around the world that are recipients of remittances every year. We have created a platform that now all of the best remitters on the planet are using. The Western Unions and the MoneyGrams, the traditional players, the Remitlys and the Wises and the Xoom, the fintechs that are using this. They're very excited about that high-quality transaction and the scale, the 5 billion endpoints that I described. It's early days, but as we grow that business, we're excited about the growth, we're excited about the yields.
You know, the rest of the cross-border opportunity for us is more about kind of large business to small business push payments. Think about, you know, paying creators around the world or, you know, marketplace payouts and those types of things. We've had great success selling the Visa Direct platform to those companies as well. Early days, we think we couldn't be more excited about the platform and the progress, and very excited obviously about the growth and the opportunity going forward.
like, what's the timeline for cross-border? Like, is it a five-year thing or a 10-year thing? Like, how long do you think it takes?
Well, it's happening now. it's certainly, it's not something that hasn't yet happened. It's happening. you know, we're just, we're focused on growing and selling the product and using the product. you know, if you're a Western Union, I mentioned them, you know, the way you start using a product like that is you put it in a couple corridors. You embed it in the app. You see how the users adopt it. You see how they're able to deliver money more quickly, then you scale it. You add it to more corridors, consumers adopt it, more corridors adopt it. you know, it's we see growth over the next several quarters, the next several years, and the next many years.
Okay, perfect. Let's talk about one last growth vector, which is B2B. I mean, there was many growth vectors, but the last big one. Huge TAM opportunity here. Maybe you could just talk about, you know, where the growth is gonna come from over the near term, which seems like more of a carded thing, but intermediate long-term, how does that evolve?
Yeah, sure. Huge TAM. you know that, you mentioned it. We do think about it, if you wanna think about it in horizons of growth opportunity, the first horizon really is the carded opportunity. It's become a huge business for us. We have about $1.5 trillion of B2B carded volume on our network now. That's grown, you know, quite nicely over the last many years. The carded opportunity remains kind of an enormous opportunity. In a developed market like the United States, it's still tons of opportunity to move spend to carded solutions. Especially as you move out of some of the developed markets into Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, introducing commercial card products in these markets is a brand new thing in many cases.
Mm-hmm.
You know, a ton of opportunity and, you know, we feel great about our ability to win. We have, we think we have the best people, the best brand, the best products. We're continuing to innovate, you know, rolling out new solutions. We have our Visa Spend Clarity platform, which helps with kind of expense management tied into our carded products. We have Visa Commercial Pay, which is a digital app that we have enabled for companies to be able to issue either single-use or multi-use virtual cards and again, like spend control, set up parameters that make sure that they have the type of control that they need. We have Visa Payables Automation, which helps with flexibility and virtual cards and reconciliation.
As well as we've rolled out, Visa Commercial Choice, which allows buyers and sellers and suppliers to set their own interchange rates because that can often become a barrier. That drives, you know, more acceptance. We're very excited about the carded opportunity. We're also excited about, you know, in the second horizon, if you will, the non-carded opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
Especially cross-border B2B high-ticket transactions. We studied the opportunity around the world, we identified this as a huge opportunity, totally underserved by the existing solutions that are out there. We've built a network called B2B Connect. We're now live in 100 countries around the world. We're continuing to scale that with financial services players all around the world. Essentially, what B2B Connect does is it allows think about a company like Caterpillar or Boeing, who is buying parts and supplies from companies all around the world. You know, paying them is terribly complicated and difficult, especially as you move out into some of the more developing countries. B2B Connect is a faster, better, more transparent and cheaper way to facilitate large ticket cross-border B2B transactions.
you know, near term, it's all about these carded opportunities that's driving growth, but we're investing in new networks and new products, in the more medium term to be able to fuel that growth.
Right. I'm gonna shift gears and talk about hot topics. You know, a year ago, we spent a lot of time talking about crypto at this conference. It's a big opportunity. Everyone was trying to figure it out. Obviously, what a difference a year makes. I'm just curious what Visa's updated views on crypto, given you know, the crypto storm here.
You know, our view on crypto is not necessarily different than it was before. We, we always kinda broke crypto down into two different things. There's the asset class, which we always said we have no idea about anything about that, which is largely what's, you know, driven the volatility that you mentioned. We also, you know, broke crypto down into blockchain and stablecoins and money movement. You know, the opportunities there are still what they were. We view it as a longer-term opportunity. In the current space, what we're doing in crypto is we're just making sure that our, you know, Visa cardholders around the world can use their cards for on-ramps and off-ramps.
Mm-hmm.
That's the most kind of foundational way that we serve the crypto community today. The second way that we serve the crypto community today has become a nice business for us, is having the exchanges like Coinbase issue Visa credentials to their users so that when, you know, a Coinbase customer goes and buys lunch, they don't have to go, you know, convert some Bitcoin to pay for that. They can just use their coinbase.com Visa card, pay $20, and it's all done in the cloud in real-time for them. That's become a very nice business for us and a great product for the exchange's users. The third thing we're focused on, you know, right now is ensuring that our network can actually settle in stablecoins.
We have various different participants in the ecosystem that want the ability to settle daily in stablecoins and, you know, we've built out the ability to do that. Longer term, we've got a team of people that are coming into work every day, R&D teams that are focused on what's really gonna happen, how do stablecoins evolve. We're, you know, working with central banks on government-backed stablecoins around the world and, you know, we'll see how that evolves. If it does evolve to be an important part of money movement domestically across-border, we wanna be involved.
Got it. You talked about blockchain. Like, do you see use cases for Visa to use blockchain or incorporate it into the network? I'm just curious.
Yeah. We actually do use blockchain technology in some of the products that we've brought to market. We've been doing that for several years now. We do see a lot of potential in the technology platform, for Visa, but also for the ecosystem.
Okay. Great. One other question that I get quite a bit about is just government nationalism and the fact that governments around the world are, you know, trying to develop their own card schemes, obviously. You know, the events that have occurred over the war, we were talking about this before pandemic and then obviously what's happened post-pandemic with the war obviously has brought that more into the focus. I'm just curious what your views are on nationalism and how you see Visa on, you know, the growth opportunity evolving for Visa given nationalism?
Yeah. Well, first, as you said, it's not a new thing.
Mm-hmm.
This is a force and a movement we've been dealing with for really decades in our business. It continues to be a very relevant topic around the world. I think what we've proven is in markets around the world that have different regulations that may or may not have domestically sponsored card schemes or real-time payment schemes or, you know, any number of things, we have found a way to be successful, to serve our clients, and to build a great business. You know, that's true in very heavily nationalistic regulated markets. It's true in markets that are much more a level playing field, and, you know, more lightly regulated markets. You know, I feel strongly we'll continue to be able to do that.
Okay. Great. Pivoting to regulatory risk, obviously it's never ending, for many players in the space. I'm just curious, as you look around the world and the regulatory challenges that you're dealing with, is there anything that you're concerned about or gives you pause?
Well, you know, we're dealing with regulations and regulatory issues all around the world every day in almost every country we do business. It's a real set of business. You know, we treat the regulators at our company like clients, like a line of business. You know, we have coverage models. We are in their offices every day. We are working to make sure that they're as educated as they possibly can on our business. And, you know, we have to comply with different laws and different regulations in 200 countries and territories around the world, so that is what we do. Am I concerned about it? Of course. You know, that's a real concern. We have to be compliant.
We have to comply with the laws of the countries in which we do business. We feel that we're all over it. We feel that, you know, our teams understand it and, you know, it doesn't change our view on the opportunities that we have ahead of us.
I know you've been president for quite some time, but as CEO, is there something you might wanna do differently to handle the regulators, or you feel like the way you guys have approached it is the right way to do it?
The way that we're approaching it, we feel very good about.
Good. Perfect. I wanna open it up for questions in the audience, but I'm gonna ask one more, and then maybe we can see if anyone has questions. I guess a lot of regulators would prefer to see interchange rates come down. I know there's a lot of unintended consequences as a result of that too. I'm just curious how you think about your model, you know, with interchange being construct, you know, in different markets?
Yeah. I think listen, we have examples of markets we do business with much lower interchange rates. We have examples in markets we do business with higher interchange rates. I mean, the spectrum of countries we do business in around the world, you know, varies dramatically in terms of interchange. Again, here too, we have proven our ability to be successful serving our clients and growing a very healthy business in lower interchange, medium interchange, high interchange, reducing interchange, increasing interchange markets around the world. We feel confident about that.
Great. All right, questions from the audience? There's one right there. All right.
Hi. Good morning. Thank you for your time today. You mentioned Tink, and this was a similar question was raised, yesterday. Recently, there was an article in the FT about Jamie Dimon sitting down with his senior executive team, because there was a conflict between the merchant acquiring wanting to offer open banking to merchants and sort of meet merchants where they want and help them reduce their cost of transactions, and with the consumer side, which had billions of dollars of revenue at stake. How would you advise Jamie about proceeding with a Tink-type, Pay by Bank service when you have the potential one business to lose revenue at the expense of another one gaining revenue?
Yeah. I'm not gonna comment on any one client or any one article or conversation. If you back up and think about that in the macro, first of all I'll put it in the context of real-time payments for a minute. The work that's happening in the United States and around the world by central banks and governments, it's smart. It's a good thing for countries to modernize their payment ecosystem. That's a smart thing for Brazil to do, for India to do, for the United States. As a citizen of the United States, that's a smart thing to do.
You know, as it relates to our business, like, we need to be able to create, as I said at the beginning of our chat here, the best way to pay and be paid for clients in the US and around the world. We believe strongly that debit cards and credit cards and commercial cards will continue to thrive and have continued to thrive in markets that have, at scale, vibrant, real-time payment and account to account services. We also use that infrastructure. You know, our network of networks that I was describing earlier, our Visa Direct platform, we're using more than 12 RTP systems around the world every day to move money as part of our Visa Direct platform and serve our clients.
The way we think about it at Visa is we wanna continue to invest and innovate in our debit cards and credit cards and digital payment systems and make them the best way to pay and be paid, but we also wanna lean into account to account and real-time payments and open banking and use that network of networks to grow our B2B payments, our B2C payments, our G2C payment solutions, and those types of things around the world.
Any other questions in the room? All right. I got one final one since we've got less than a minute left. Just in terms of valuations and strategic options, obviously, you guys use a lot of your free cash to buy back stock. Are there opportunities to do deals now that valuations have come down? Are there any strategic areas that you think, you know, you could buy a capability?
We're always looking, 365 days a year. Our teams around the world are always on the watch. One of the again, the great benefits of being who we are is if there's a company that's doing great things in the ecosystem of money movement and networks around the world, we're probably working with them. We may have invested in them, but they're probably a partner, they're probably a client. We love the perch that we sit at. We're always looking for opportunities. You know, we also believe strongly in our product and engineering teams. We build great products. I think over time, you'll see us continue to use a mix of organic and inorganic ways to continue to grow the network and our services and serve our clients.
All right. We're gonna end it right there, right on time. Thank you.