Ajay Banga - Mastercard, Inc.
Management
So I think blockchain has a whole ton of potential use cases, and I think the real question that you're asking is how will that connect to our traditional customers. So what I'm trying to give you a sense of is we've been investing in our own platform in blockchain, not just to create our own blockchain, but to really learn how blockchains work. So whether we, in the future, operate only off our own platform or we operate as a facilitator for other people's blockchains, the objective is to be confident and knowledgeable on how they operate. So we've filed a number of patents in the space in our own blockchain and our own platform. We have developed APIs, and we've also done things like making investments in organizations like the Digital Currency Group, which enable us to look at the way other people are innovating using their blockchains. So what you saw at Money 2020 was that blockchain platform and APIs, and there was a hackathon there, and 60 teams of developers tested on them successfully. But the idea is that we will open this up to financial institutional merchants so they can connect into our settlement network. But remember, this is early days. Don't expect this to be a switch that gets turned on tomorrow. It has to be built country by country, connecting into settlement networks and the like. The initial focus is on the B2B space, because we continue to believe that the challenges of speed, of transparency and costs, both in domestic and cross-border payments in B2B, are more interesting than trying to find technology looking for a problem to solve in consumer payments that consumers do not perceive. So to us there's a bigger opportunity in B2B. We're working on three or four ways of making the blockchain solution that we are trying to put out there different from others, and the first one is on privacy. So that we're trying to make sure that transaction details are shared only among the participants of a transaction, while you've got your (24:37) or you've got a permissioned blockchain. The second one is flexibility. So you can use these APIs, combine them with other APIs on Mastercard, and maybe create a range of new apps. Third is scalability. Obviously, if we can connect it into our whole system and to use our leg network rules, then scalability becomes possible, and therefore reach. Because through our system, over time, you could reach into everywhere we operate with our settlement network. That's what we're up to. Now, it's not currently by itself. We've got a bunch of things going on here: virtual cards, Mastercard Send, Vocalink, all of which are aimed at supporting cross-border and domestic B2B payment flows. And so that's what we're up to with the blockchain.