Conference Transcript - MA 2026-11-09

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

Thanks for everybody for coming. I'm Brian Keene. I cover fintech here at Citi, and we're excited to have Ed McLaughlin, who's president and chief technology officer at MasterCard. So Ed and I have done a few of these in the past every couple of years, so we're due for an update here. So thanks for being here, Ed. Good to see you again in a different context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different firm here. Wanted to ask to get into some of the specifics on MasterCard's technology and innovation. But just before we level set here, just wanted to talk a little bit. I know you've had a long history at MasterCard. Maybe you can talk about kind of what you've done through MasterCard and kind of maybe how that job's changed over the last several years.

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Well, so much has changed. Yeah, so I've been with MasterCraft about 20 years. I was part of the leadership team that was brought in when we were getting ready for our IPO. Prior to that, my background was technology startups. We didn't know how to call it fintech then. I think we called it e-finance or something, but we caught up to that.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

Yeah.

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

So I joined the firm in 2005, and since then, I've run the global franchise. I was responsible for the emerging and digital payments. I was chief digital payments officer as we were doing the first wave through mobile. I was CIO for a while, and for the last decade, I've been the CTO for technology and operations for MasterCard. So the engineering teams, infra teams, ops, customer care. Tech hubs, all of that is sort of my purview. And one quick one, actually, because I thought of this this morning. It was really amazing when I joined MasterCard. The first project I worked on was this Buck Rogers' first-in-the-world contactless payments on the MTA in 2005, working with Citi and the MTA to see if such a thing would be possible. 200 milliseconds to open the gate, use existing customer accounts, and a few months ago when we got to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our IPO, I got to take the four train, the Lexington Avenue train, which is what we had piloted on, and watch hundreds of people tapping their devices and iPhones and Android phones to get onto the subway and not even thinking about it.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

So for this conference, how much of this future we're living in now? MasterCard was such an integral part in creating the underlying technologies that made it. It was just an amazing thing to see. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. It's been a great 20 years plus, I guess, in this business in MasterCard. It's just really amazing. Wanted to talk about, obviously, the market kind of continues to evolve here rapidly, and you being on the kind of the frontier here on some of the tech trends. Just be interested in your thoughts on what you're seeing out there and how MasterCard's technology is positioned.

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Sure, and I'm sure that's something that every investor is very, very interested in. So one of the things I'd say for the tech trends is the advantage we see come with the scale, the assets, the global reach, the acceptance network we have, that we can all apply to the new technology areas. So when I think about things like agentic commerce, which I'm sure we're going to be talking about, or what we're seeing in cyber, both the defense and in cybersecurity and the marketing opportunities and things like fighting fraud and working with our customers, Where we see crypto and our recent acquisition of BVNK and how crypto and tokenized deposits fit into the MasterCard network structure. There's just amazing new technologies that are coming out that are going to help us do what we do better. It also opens up new markets, commercial and the complexities that are there. We think a lot of the A2A work will really help with that. When we think about financial inclusion and how we can reach and serve people that we never could before, like we did through mobile, I think all of these things are coming together with both the technology. And the market opportunity. But the one thing I will say is, from our thesis, it always stands on the principles that we've built the franchise with, right? To take advantage of these new opportunities, it has to start with trust. Trust from the merchants, trust from the consumers, trust from the regulators that we'll have the right technology and we'll do the right thing. What's the basis of trust? It's resilience. We know this. We're all consumers, that it works everywhere, every time, flawlessly. Every person tapping their mobile to get onto the subway, know that gate's going to open. That's the foundation of trust, and that's what we deliver. And then I'd end with speed, right? How do we get the right things at the right time into consumers' pans? And how is instant gets a whole lot faster out in the marketplace to make sure our technology is fast enough to keep up with consumer desires?

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

So, just thinking about MasterCard and that card network, and that's the nuts and bolts of when you think of MasterCard, can you just comment on how you've modernized that network and what that means and what it's unlocked for the business over the years?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

So I have to say it. I haven't thought about it as a card network in years. And I know where you're going with that one. So when I think about the foundation network that powers MasterCard, the underlying payments transformed systems, and the reason I'm joking about card is it's probably been six, seven years that the majority of our transactions have been non-card-based. If you think of the vast preponderance, which is tokenization, device-based subscription, and other type of things, we really are a general purpose, multi-rail payment network that we're running now with a tremendous heritage in cards. And you didn't ask, but one question I get all the time is, well, when does the card go away? And the answer, in my mind, is when the last person wants one, right? We have something that works great that everyone loves that we can then add all the new experiences they want on that. So when you think about how we're modernizing the network, it really does start with what we call contextual commerce. Think about all the new and different ways that you can use the MasterCard's network. And I think there's few players in the world that are more advantaged. By the freedom from getting out of the physical world into the digital world, the card was always just a token we gave you to get you back onto our network. So how and where you can use your MasterCard credentials, that's changing rapidly, and that's adding more and more opportunity to what we have in the network. It's also geographic as we're modernizing, the ability to make sure that we can run servicing and processing and persistence anywhere in the world. We operate in 210 different regulatory domiciles in countries around the world. So the ability to distribute processing, like you probably saw earlier this year, we're now doing end-to-end transaction authorization in Europe, building on work that we've done in South Africa and other countries. So our ability to reach our customers and serve our customers where they are is a big part of the modernization. Other things I would add is the infrastructure side. Our ability to leverage public, private, and sovereign clouds as infrastructure all connected by that global network fabric. And maybe the last part you've seen, and maybe the most profound transformation in our business over the last few years, that virtuous cycle is we continue to add more and more services before, during, and after the transaction. So a big part of the tech modernization has been the services enablement to leverage not only the transaction flow to make it that much more valuable to get us more transactions into the system, but also how we can enrich and augment it and create new value streams.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

You talked about trust and thinking about that MasterCard's technology and that network operations. How do you think about, especially in this day and age, the security of it, the resilience, the flexibility, and what keeps you up at night that you constantly have to make sure you're protecting against?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

So, I will say, the operations, the security, the resilience, that's what keeps you up during the day, right? That's the job. That's what we do and obsess about every day and every time, right? There are a lot of changes. So, we're constantly working to see what might be the next set of opportunities or threats that are coming in the network. And maybe those are the late-night thoughts of how are things changing and what's next and ensuring that we're going to be ready for it. But for security itself, one of the conversations I'm sure as investors everyone is engaged in is this question of attacker and defenders. As new capabilities are coming online, are firms more vulnerable? Are they able to get greater capabilities to defend themselves? I think the answer is both are true. Right now, particularly in the short term, I think a lot of firms that have never been on the front line before are seeing a whole new set of what I'll call mass-scaled attempts on their networks. It's not anything that's new or novel, but the speed and scale and scope of those attacks are now AI-powered and enabled, and that's what we have to be ready for. So MasterCard was always faced with a very, very sophisticated nation-state actor. Others who would test and probe what we're doing. We see that amplified right now. But over the long term, and I think it fits in with many of your thesis, I think the advantage goes to the defenders with these powerful new tools, but only those that can afford the defense and have the scale and discipline to be able to do it. So I do think there is, and any time the market becomes more complex. In essence, it becomes more expensive in some ways. There's a benefit that goes to the scale players that can amortize across a much bigger footprint. So we are investing heavily in cyber, cybersecurity, both to defend our network, also as a real opportunity for us to, again, create more value, serve our customers better, and generate new revenues. You've already seen with AI and what we've done with our decision management platform in fighting fraud today. It's a multi-billion dollar business for us. So for the last decade, MasterCard has been a leader in AI. I think that becomes a really big part of where you see our opportunities and advantages going forward. So I'd start with that. Resilience is also something you build in. We had an example that some of you may have seen where in Africa, there was a... As part of the conflict in the Red Sea, there was a massive cable cut as an anchor drag took out a bunch of cables going up one side of the continent. There was a natural disaster, a landslide undersea on the other side of the continent, and a lot of the bandwidth was diminished. Many organizations took real impact there. It's a tribute to the resiliency of our network that we were able to reside through that. So we'll continue to invest in the scope and resiliency we need for the critical infrastructures that we're providing.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

Got it. You know, as an analyst, I get often the question about the competitive environment and, you know, People are always trying to understand, you know, potential new competitors into the market. I'm thinking about, you know, I get asked about Wero in Europe and the A-to-A rails as competition, like, oh, there's going to be volume coming off of MasterCard versus these competing networks. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the reasons why MasterCard continues to take share and what's competitive and what's not when you look at some of these other options?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Yeah, and maybe it goes back to the idea of change being the constant and so much is changing. We talked about the last 20 years' experience at MasterCard.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

It has always been a highly, highly competitive market.

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

And each time we see some of these big market transitions, there's always questions of new and emerging competition. We saw it in e-commerce. We saw it in mobile. We saw it in digital. We'll see it in the current AI and agentic era. So it gets back to the values that we have at the network. The scale and distribution we already have, the operations skill and discipline, the acceptance network that we can bring and tailor to these new environments. So really the only arbiter. Of whether a competing technology or solution or a MasterCard solution gets adopted is the experience of the consumer. It's the value it provides to the merchant. It's the compliance to the regulations within the marketplace. And those are all areas that we've excelled. So if you look during this highly, highly competitive period from, I'd say, about 2020 till now. We've gone from switching 60% of our transactions to over 72% of our transactions. That's the material of the market voting during this time that the value the MasterCard network was bringing and their ability to serve their interest in business better by working through MasterCard is one of those things you pay off. And I'll tie back to some of, again, our AI investments, the ability to fight fraud, the ability to provide things like zero liability consumers or guaranteed payments to merchants. Those are the real values that MasterCard has always had. So I have no doubt it'll be a competitive market. It'll continue to be a competitive market. But the assets we have. The capability we have to innovate and bring new value into the market, I think that's the key differentiator for us versus others that are out there. But we earn that every day.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

I wanted to move over to AI and agentic commerce. Can you just talk about some of the risks and opportunities AI presents to MasterCard and your services suite?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Sure. Well, let me start with, and we touched on it earlier, some of the risks, clearly in the cyberspace. How AI can be used for that. We're seeing, I break it into two things. You have attacks on the network that we talked about, the attacker defender and where we are there and the vigorous defenses that we put up and vigilance we always have. We're also seeing a lot of attacks using payment systems, and that's the whole scam environment that we see. The fraud environment that we see, and that's where getting back to the value of a MasterCard and the brand promise is so important, is people do have recourse. We do stand behind those transactions for them as opposed to some of the competitive alternatives that you've talked about. So we've made significant investments and are generating a lot of value in the entire ecosystem and our network in helping people fright fraud. We stop tens of billions of dollars of fraud attempts every day. We continue to up the AI models and capabilities we have to prevent that. One of the ones we've talked about quite publicly is our decision intelligence, or now our DI Pro, where we found not only in certain super high-risk sectors, a massive shift in our ability to detect fraud, up to 300% sometimes, but also what we're seeing is that it's reducing the number of signals and false positives, so more good business comes through the network. So that's how we're harnessing new technologies and new capabilities to both defend the network as well as to protect everyone who's using it. And I think it's that use of the unique data we have, the heritage we have in applying it to generate new value that will really help us in the baseline AI era. But AI is much more than the question of what we're doing in cyber or what we're doing to prevent scams. When I think about it from MasterCard as an entity, it's benefited us in so many ways already. So all of our employees, very early on, we gave access to AI productivity tools to make sure they could use it to use their job better. And we've seen strong results from that. But the more important thing I think we did is we looked at each of our jobs and our job families as a collection of skills. We said, what's the workbench that helps them do that job better? And probably the clearest area and one closest to my heart is what we've seen in software engineering. So all 100% of our developers have AI assistance for the software engineering they're doing. In certain areas, we've seen not only 50% increases in throughput, but a real reduction in defects and an increase in the quality of work that's coming through there. And it's not the access to the tools. It's the learning, the focus, it's building the harnesses, it's applying it to your environment where we've made those investments and we're seeing real return. So you'll see AI helping, not generically, but very, very specifically across different jobs and job families. So AI supporting the sales and sales function, AI supporting product management and product development functions. And that's really what we're seeing with that workbench concept, and it's paying off for us well. The other thing is if you think about operations, another thing near and dear to my heart, so much of what we do in ops is things like signals intelligence, managing the fleet, understand what we're doing. So again, this idea of human-computer interaction, and to be able to offload some of the cognitive things that would always have been part of operations, to run more efficiently, to be able to scale more, to distribute more around the network. We're seeing solid returns there on that. And maybe the last is AI enabling the value of the products that sells we've had. So for years, we've used machine learning, backpropagation, AI techniques to fight things like fraud. Now we're seeing with the introduction of Gentic and Cognitive, we can make our services and our services and offerings that much better. So you may have seen things like our virtual C-suite. Where we're providing small businesses access to those tools to help them run their business better and get expertise. We have another one I love is our customers and issuers can configure rules on our network itself. Great differentiated capability, but it can be complex. So we're adding agentic capabilities to help them. Better define and run the business they're doing with MasterCard. And then the last, it goes back to where we started, things like contextual commerce. Or how do we bring the value of the MasterCard network and enable it for everyone using AI to change consumer experiences out in the field? And that's, I always say, the history we've done and what we're building on is whether that transit example I gave you at the beginning to apply our network or an Amazon and e-commerce or an Uber and mobility, Spotify and digital media, all of those have benefited from being able to access the MasterCard network. And our consumers benefit by being able to have access to all these new experiences. And that's where we really see the agentic and agentic payment side coming in.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

Yeah. And then just to follow up on that, then on agentic commerce, we've obviously seen Muse and others launch recently. How do you guys see that kind of agentic commerce evolving? And what are some of the revenue opportunities? You know, we always get the question, is it a positive? Is it a neutral? You know, how do you think about that as we move to Agentec?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Yeah, I would say a couple of framing thoughts on this one for everyone, because I know there's so many questions around that. And in some ways, it's what we do all the time in technology. It's a question of clarity and proximity. I think the clarity is absolutely there. We've already seen over 40% attributed product searches or consumer searching for information about products they're going to buy are AI-assisted in some way today. So for certain of those products they're researching, taking the next step of saying, okay, great, now buy it for me. It just simply seems like a logical next step. Now, are the agents there today? Some are doing better than others. You know, it's a mixed bag, but you can see the direction of travel where it is, and the question is the timeline for that. But what it means for consumers is something we've seen over and over again. They want to know that the environment is ready, that MasterCard is ready for them when they want to take advantage of that. And again, the only arbiter of a new way of doing things, new contextual commerce is the value consumers perceive out of it. So actually, before we came up, we were joking about this. We saw this with mobile payments. A dozen years ago, when we launched Apple Pay, one of the top consumer questions was, can I still use my card? And the answer was, of course. And then they were very interested and exciting for that first, second, third tap they started to do on their mobile. And it's really been a decade that we saw the behavior transition. I'm sure you'll see the same thing with the Gentic. So people want to be able to take advantage of it for a specific use case for things they want to do, but what will be most important to them is kind of use my existing credentials with my existing. I'm still going to have a Netflix subscription. I'm still going to be going into the grocery store and want to use my account in different ways. And it gently becomes additive to that, which is how we see it as a great new revenue opportunity. And it's not only in the consumer payments that I know we're all focused on because we're all consumers. Think about the complexities of B2B. As that gets more streamlined, the ability to inject things like virtual cards and the advantages of the MasterCard network actually become easier to introduce that to the environment. We also announced earlier in this year machine-to-machine payments. I think that's a whole new economic sector that's going to come out as agents who want to source from other agents need a financial underpinning to which to do so. The ability to use the existing networks and tap into the 3.7 billion accounts we already have on the network becomes a huge advantage for that. So we see new types of commerce. We also see what used to be monolithic transactions potentially becoming multiple transactions. People take things that used to be a subscription, you know, a set and forget, and have their agent become much more dynamic around that. So I think it becomes very, very additive. Not only to MasterCard's network and our opportunity, but for consumers' corporate lives as they introduce this to do things they couldn't do before, things that were hard to do before. So really, really excited about the potential there. And I think the good news is, just like we said, when do cards go away? When does a Juntic happen? It's when individual consumers around the world decide it's better for them, and they'll want to tap into it. So one final thought, because it does come back to those foundations. Just like MasterCard helped define and invent the tokenization and token standards that mobile payments are based on, we have the same thing for agent pay, and it's already out in the marketplace. So the ability to get a secure token that you can dedicate to your agent. Years ago, in Internet of Things, we had talked about non-human actors participating in the system, and we're building on that foundation. So I can put... A secure MasterCard token from my account into my agent, just like I might have put it in my subscription service or put it into my mobile earlier. We have now parameters around what we call verifiable intent. So we know this is what you intended to do. Strong identity for agent actors so merchants can know who they're doing business with, just as we've always identified merchants on our network. And the ability to provide consumer protections around those So just as we've seen in each era, e-commerce, mobile, digital, now with Gentic, I think it's getting the right frameworks and parameters in place, which we have. It's the ability to use the scale and acceptance of our network, which is there today, and allow consumers... To figure out in their lives and in what context this makes the most sense for them. And our promise, that brand promise, is MasterCard is already ready for it for when you are. And that's where we see a growth opportunity.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

Another big growth avenue, obviously, is what we're seeing in digital money, blockchain, and digital assets continue to evolve. How is MassCard playing in this space, and what opportunities are there to capitalize on the growth?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Well, it's always and already been a big tailwind for us. And I think with the Clarity Act and other things that have helped normalize some of the regulation around, it's been really, really helpful. But what you've already seen is that interface between the fiat world and the crypto world. It's something we've always enabled. So it's another way that you can use your MasterCard credential or your payment instrument to move money into and out of what we would see in the crypto world. The other thing, just like we talked about Agentic, there will be environments where a programmable crypto piece of money is a better solution. So through our BV&K acquisition, we have the ability not only to bring money into and out of the crypto world, we have crypto native capabilities that we can introduce into the network as a true multi-money network. We've processed well over 100, I think over 150 different currencies today. So adding new currency and payment types to the network is actually a pretty natural extension. So it'll allow us to work with new crypto, just like we've worked with fiat money in the past, and leverage the scale and the acceptance and the capability the network always has. So I think it'll allow us, particularly in sectors like cross-border, maybe in the machine-to-machine or agentic-to-agentic payments that we've talked about, have a different programmatic underpinning. Which gives you new capabilities, but one that actually ties into and augments the multi-purpose or general purpose network that we have.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

You mentioned BB&K. You know, you guys have made several acquisitions in the sector. And when you think about it from a technical perspective, you know, what does BB&K have or some of the assets that you're making, you know, you couldn't build yourself that buy was the better option?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Yeah. And I have to give it to you from a technical perspective because that's what I do. So anytime we see a shift happening or an opportunity happening in the marketplace. You go through the analysis. Do you develop it yourself? Do you partner with someone for that? Do you make a strategic acquisition to bring it in? And really, I think the key on a strategic acquisition for us is where can we get differentiated assets that immediately augment the value of our network that will also benefit from coming through MasterCard distribution and the other capabilities that we have. And as every investor knows, that's how you make and balance those decisions. So BV&K, I think, was a great example with their history and operations they already had in the crypto space. The ability to immediately add that to what we had done for bridging money in and out of the crypto space and the ability to have those capabilities rapidly added to the network at a proven level just accelerated everything that we were wanting to do. There was no need or reason to recreate it. We had a great asset in a previous partnership with them around that. I'll highlight another example, and this is one of the ones that I've been just so happy is now part of our system. A few years ago now, I think, we brought in a company called Recorded Future. And they do signals intelligence for threat, and if you think of everything that's now happening, what we talked about earlier in the attackers and defenders and AI and crypto space and everything that's going on, working with Recorded Futures, first, it expanded the buying centers that we're talking to. So half of their business was, you know, non-mathematical half of their business, a portion of their business was working with things like government agencies. So we now have a channel where other MasterCard capabilities we are already engaged with and partners with new types of firms around there. So as we build our cyber business, it becomes a great channel for us. They also had unique data and insights. And data is the hardest thing to reproduce, right? It becomes the real asset in the AI era. So their knowledge of what was going on in the cyber and crypto space and our ability to bring that back into our fraud scoring systems to make them smarter than anything else out there because they had access to underlying data that none of our competitors would, the ability to bring that and work with our customers in new ways as they are looking at what are their cyber threats and the information they want, the signals they want, just like the government agencies. Agencies used to want those signals to make their security operations all that better. So it was a great way of getting a whole unique new data set that would make what we were doing richer, that would get us access into buying centers we didn't have before, and we could immediately bring it into the network to scale it and bring value for it. So those are the type of things that I look at, and I think you will continue to see us constantly looking in the market. For those accretive ways that we can accelerate things that we would want to do anyway, get access to unique data or assets that would be hard to reproduce that have been incubated for a while, and the ability to scale it through the existing distribution and channels that MasterCard have. That's really been the winning formula for us in our acquisitions across the years, and you'll continue to see us focus in that area.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

You know, it's fair to say here, especially talking, that change is the one constant here. So I guess if we keep that in mind, what are some of the five or so non-negotiables when you think about critical building, scaling, and managing technology and will help MasterGard continue to win in the future? Five? So you're going to back me into an enumerated list?

Edward McLaughlin, CTO

Yeah, yeah, I call out five. Three to five. Three to five, right, out of the universe. Well, like any good technologist, I want to start at zero, right? You start at position zero. So the one thing I just want to highlight we talked about earlier is I think has always been, but particularly going forward, trust will be the highest card because of all the change, because of everything that's happening. And I always say the MasterCard brand is a promise. And you all know it if you're using a MasterCard, right, that it will work every time, that it will be a good stored of the data and information that comes from the network and how we use it to make the services that you get better. Trust that we have the highest level of ethics as an organization. And I think that is a huge asset in uncertain times. So everything I would talk about, I think, reinforces and underpins MasterCard's trusted position with consumers, regulators, merchants, and others around the world. Hard asset to reproduce and one we defend every day. If I had to then think about what are some of the key elements that help us through or will allow us to thrive in this area with so much change and so much happening, I will come back to scale. The advantages that the data sets we have, when I look at things like applying AI to transaction history. We have a relevant training set of half a trillion transactions easily, that we can pick up signals that no one else can. That fraud attack that's happening in Portugal right now will be in Bolivia next week, and we can see that and share that. So the scale of what we have across the network, our ability to make investments in things like cybersecurity and bring them to partners is a real advantage and a real advantage we can go down. Having 100 plus million acceptance points, almost 200 million acceptance points, I think, around the world are a scale that we can bring to anyone. Having 3 plus 3.7, I think, billion accounts on the network will allow a new agentic player to tap into a scale that they can only get through a MasterCard. So we'll continue to emphasize the natural advantages that gives us and play as a scale player in the marketplace, because as we've seen over and over and over again, technology. There's natural advantages to there. Second, I'd say speed. Our chief architect would love us to say instance getting a whole lot faster. So the things you're seeing us to do, for example, with same-day settlement, so people getting the money through the system faster, the speed of being able to bring new products to market as we apply AI into our engineering and being able to get that value out to our consumers faster, and even just the speed for consumers to make sure that you're getting the instant feedback loops, The reactions you want. So a real emphasis, I think, on not only scale, but the speed it can give. And while I stay with the S, it's security. And we've talked about that already. It's the foundation of the trust. It's the foundation of the mission. It's who we are to make sure that as we run these critical infrastructures around the world, we're always delivering the highest level of security. And that security also gives us commercial advantage as we can use those investments in security to generate value for customers across the network that will benefit from that value that we're creating for it. Resilience. We've talked about that. I think resilience goes unsaid, right? The knowledge that your MasterCard will always be there, land anywhere in the world, will be there every time. And I think as a MasterCard cardholder, you've seen that resilience in action. That's that foundation that we'll continue to leverage new technologies for, and we'll make sure we invest in a new technological solution we have. If that agent doesn't work, it'll be a long time before you go back to it. If it works flawlessly. You would always want to use that with your MasterCard. So resilience is a key in the future. And I'll end, and it was funny, we just did an update to our board of directors on our tech strategy. And it's kind of funny to have to say this as a tech guy. But in the end, I think any technology approach, any tech strategy, is actually a people strategy. Right? All this capability, all this great stuff is available to everyone. It's who we are. How good we're at it and the purposes we put it towards. And that's where I feel great. That's where I feel the best about MasterCard is over the 20 years, the skill, capability, the expertise of our technologists in payments technology as we keep inventing the future. That foundation is probably the greatest asset we have is the people. And I'll end on people because the one thing I can also assure you is we never, ever forget who it's for. This is how people get access to what they need for their families. It's how they get to work in the morning. It's how you can land anywhere in the world with complete confidence that you can get a car, you can get to your hotel, because you're using our MasterCard. And we take that mission to heart every day. That's where the trust comes from. That's what enables and animates all the use of technology that we have, is who it's for.

Brian Keene, Analyst — Citi

All right. With that, Ed, I think we're all a little bit smarter. Thanks for that, and thanks for being here. Thank you. Take care.