Ajaypal S. Banga - Mastercard, Inc.
Management
It depends what you mean B2B. B2B is a very big world. And in fact, that is stuff that is very material in our P&L today, which is our commercial cards business. Corporate T&E cards, purchasing cards, fleet cards, virtual cards, that is material today in our business, growing handsomely, giving us good margins, and in fact delivering good returns for us, not just domestically but also cross-border. Then there's the B2B space that comprises the things we could do with Mastercard Send or VocaLink or HomeSend, as I was talking earlier, or combinations of those. Those products are both for consumer reasons but also B2B, also B2C, also P2P. That stuff is what you'll see over the next two, three, five years being developed. The distribution channel for that as compared to the traditional commercial business, the distribution channel for that is, in fact, very effective through banks because of one very simple reason. Most banks tend to be focused on larger-sized transactions in the cross-border B2B space. And there is a great deal of space in the relatively smaller cross-border B2B space, which is inefficient both in terms of the scaling, authorizing, and settlement times involved, but also relatively inefficient in terms of the data that is exchanged at the point of payment and the fraud opportunities that exist in that system, all of which we can bring to the party through these larger banks as their partner to extend their target market as well. But then there are also other ways of getting to that marketplace. There are ways of getting to that marketplace which go through distribution channels run through digital companies. But very often, they will need partner banks anyway because those companies are not banks. Without being a bank, how do you operate the digital or other cross-border P2P or B2B business of exchanging money? You need banks in the system. So you've got to be careful about what you mean by distribution. Does distribution mean getting to get someone to start understanding the product to then use it, or does distribution mean that the rails still need banking to run? And I will tell you in most places the rails still need banks to run them. The question of how you get them to those SMEs or those middle-sized companies, you could do it directly through banks or you could do it through alternative chains that you could utilize over time. Bring them on, bring in all of them. But we believe that banks are great partners in this space because they need to play the role where the money needs to be exchanged. They play a very critical role in that process.