Ajaypal S. Banga
Analyst · Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan
So I kind of, when I approach this -- I think we had this conversation with the investor and analyst community sometime back as well, and I was talking about how I would be reluctant to agree to long-term changes in the methodology by which interchange is computed and used. We did agree, as you know, one portion of this is a short-term change. But the surcharge angle, frankly, for a long time in MasterCard, surcharging has been going on in some parts of the world, partly promoted by legal changes in those countries. Discounting for cash has been going on for a long time and we have never enforced anything differently from that. I still share the belief that all these kinds of things create friction for a consumer, for a merchant, for everybody in the electronification of payments. And so, when I talked about that second concentric circle of secular change, these things create friction. Frictions aren't good for increasing the speed of that secular change. Yet, the merchants were very clear, the ones who represented [ph] us and negotiated with us, that without that, there was no conversation. So we came to the point where it's either to agree to part of that -- from my perspective. This is only mine, by the way, this is not the other parties in the negotiation. I'm not trying to speak on behalf of the banks. I'm not trying to speak on behalf of Visa. This is me, MasterCard. We believe the best thing to do was looking at our experience of surcharging in other markets where, frankly, it didn't really lead to a great deal of actual surcharges being placed other than in a couple of kinds of areas where cash isn't quite able to compete. So for example, online airline bookings and the like. And even there, in Australia, the Reserve Bank of Australia stepped in recently and created caps for the level of that surcharging realizing that this was not quite what they wanted to have happened, I'm assuming, which is why they stepped in. So when I think about that here, in this agreement, we have also managed to get in some of those protections, the cap and what they could charge, the declaration to the consumer with clarity, both on the receipt and in the store, the level playing field concept that we think we've got in there. All these were attempted as a way to sort of try and box the issue while moving forward. So the bigger picture of tackling the 80-something percentage of transactions that are still in cash can keep on being pursued, instead of all our thoughts being tied up in the passion behind this issue. That's kind of how I approached it, Tien-Tsin. And so it is friction. I don't like the friction but I'm trying to minimize it with as much lubricant as I can put in the system.