Ajay Banga
Analyst · Julio Quinteros with Goldman Sachs
Your question’s a very deep question. And I haven't yet seen bundling of debit and credit discussions. Although remember that the way banks operate those 2 businesses tend to be in somewhat different business lines inside, and they're answering different consumer needs in many ways. So I don't know that, that actually will lead to a bundling in some way other than with maybe a few very large global accounts where that kind of conversation may happen. This fee, it's early -- it's very, very difficult to talk about what banks are planning to do with Durbin just because in the last couple of months, given all the progress on trying to get the bill on the floor of Congress, the focus has been around that. At the same time, within our company is with all the issuing organizations. There are teams of people working on different scenarios to do with where this could end up. My sense is that some of it is pretty much out there in the open, that the level if it were to go through the way it was originally proposed, the level of, let's say, revenue going away from issuer revenue lines is so large that they're going to have to find ways to get back some of that. And that's the experience we had in Australia, whether it be through fees on checking accounts or fees on cards, or restricted expenditure on debit cards of certain types, or the stoppage of rewards on debit cards or the disincenting of employees in branches to sell debit cards, all of which might lead to a somewhat different way of consumer spending, maybe more on their credit line. It might also lead to a number of consumers not being able to afford their banking accounts with as much ease as they used to, and that may lead to a prepaid card getting more and more attention, and issuers as a way to cater to that customer. So at the lower end of the spectrum, you know what I mean? So from credit on one end, to paper at the lower end, to the actual impact on debit, then think within debit, it's unclear to me right now, whether signature and PIN will be here the way they used to. It's unclear to me whether merchants will be incented to put in more PIN pads or not if the -- if the discount rate on the 2 is the same. It's unclear to me therefore how merchants will behave in this. And so there are so many imponderables that what we've got is a series of different, let's say, situations and our operating system within those. And that's what we're doing, and it's like a whole laundry list of things that are going on inside our company and inside our competitors, I'm sure, and inside issuing banks. That's kind of where it is.