Conference Transcript - V 2026-09-08

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

All right, everyone. We're going to get started here. Next up, we're very excited to have Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa. He served at Visa for a very long time, nearly a decade, and before that was CEO of Consumer Banking at J.P. Morgan. Ryan, thank you for joining us today. Really looking forward to the conversation.

Speaker 2

It's great to be here. Thanks.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

All right. So I wanted to kick us off with a reflection of results so far over the past year and really just the notable strength that we've seen. Spend volume growth has been the fastest that it's been since pre-COVID, excluding the post-COVID recovery. Your value-added services portfolio is growing north of 30%, which I want to touch on later. You took over the business in 2023 and three and a half years later, despite what's been a period of reasonable amount of disruption across the payments ecosystem, Visa's performing really well. So what would you attribute the success so far? And, you know, to the extent that the stock hasn't reflected that, what do you think the market is missing?

Speaker 2

On the last topic about what the market's missing, you know, I think you and the audience might be better positioned to answer that question. On the Courier question, you know, I think in short, we have a strategy that's working. We have a leadership team that's very experienced and focused on executing that strategy. We have enormous opportunities ahead of us, and we've been deploying a lot of products and innovations in the market to capture that strategy. So I think that's the short answer. The longer version of that answer is, you know, three and a half, four years ago, we stepped back and did a fair bit of work to set the strategy that we're executing today. You know, we looked at our capabilities, our market position, the TAMs that were out there, the competitive sets, and we put in place a strategy that we thought could fuel the type of growth that you were mentioning. We did a lot of work to syndicate that strategy inside the company, up and down, you know, from the most senior people all the way down to country teams all around the world to make sure they understood it. We shared it with investors at our investor day. And when I transitioned into the role that I'm in right now, we used that as an opportunity to essentially rewire the operating model of the company. We restructured how the organization worked with senior leaders responsible for value-added services, for CMS, for consumer payment, those types of things. We gave them full-stacked leadership teams. We dedicated product and engineering teams to build a roadmap to ultimately ship the product and services that I was describing, and we rewired the entire performance management system in the company, how OKRs were set, how people were measured in terms of their performance, how people were paid based on their performance against the measurements that we put in place, so on and so forth. So, you know, we're now a few years into that journey. The strategy remains what it is, and, you know, I think the momentum that you're seeing is in large part driven by the fantastic leaders we have all around the world executing that strategy.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Yeah. So let's touch a little bit on the momentum and just what you're seeing on the broader macro environment. You've consistently highlighted resilient spending across spin bands, You've seen some recent tailwinds from tax refunds, gas prices, Visa Direct, some of the big sporting events year to date. You've also seen some headwinds in areas like cross-border travel due to the Middle East conflict. What are you seeing in terms of the consumer health today, and how are these dynamics kind of impacting spend levels as we close out the year? Again, in short, I would say strength and stability.

Speaker 2

You know, if you look at, let's just talk about the United States, You know, you've got to understand there's a lot of uncertainty, right? Consumers and businesses do have a lot of uncertainty. You see that in, you know, the consumer confidence measurements. You know, there are uncertainty about some of the affordability issues. They're uncertain about the elections. They're uncertain about a lot of things. But if you actually look at our business and how they're spending, it's strong and stable. You know, in the U.S. for the last 6, you know, 8, 10, 12, 18 quarters, months, I should say, you know, last year and a half, let's call it, our business in the U.S. has been growing about 6 to 8 percent roughly. This is on a roughly $7 trillion business. That's the size of our business in the U.S., so it's very broad-based, as you said. In the last quarter, our U.S. business grew 10%. If you look at quarter to date through the end of August, it's been growing about 9%. So you've got a strong and stable spending business in the U.S. If you zoom out and kind of look at our business globally through the end of August, we're seeing the continued strength we saw in our third fiscal quarter. Payment transaction growth, stable at about 10% year-over-year growth. Cross-border has actually accelerated a little bit. We've seen cross-border go from about 12% year-over-year growth in the last quarter. We're running at about 14% through the end of August. So it's a strong and stable consumer spending kind of in the U.S. and around the world.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

That's great. On the cross-border acceleration, is there a tilt to that? Like, is it Middle East recovery, or is it more broad-based across the entire portfolio?

Speaker 2

We continue to see e-commerce growing faster than travel. That's been a trend that we noted in the last quarter, and that continues to be a driver of the strong performance. Yeah, makes sense.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Okay, AI is a huge topic for investors. Every day there's new news about fundraisers, new data centers. We've heard less about the benefits of kind of implementing AI at scale across enterprise, and I think that's where Visa has some positive data points to share. On your latest call, you shared some of the significant productivity enhancements that you're seeing across the organization. So I was hoping you could just talk about the strategy internally that you have for driving AI adoption and, you know, what your vision is for AI internally at Visa.

Speaker 2

So first, I think we're still very early in all of this in terms of the impact and the power these tools are going to have on the effectiveness, the efficiency, you know, the accuracy of certainly Visa and I think companies more broadly. We were early adopters of generative AI in this, you know, next cycle of AI. I say this cycle of AI because we've been, you know, AI has been embedded in what we've done for decades at Visa. But, you know, if you look kind of post-Chat GBT moment, we've been early and aggressive adopters of these tools inside of Visa. Visa employees have access to all of the models and the tools, you know, at their disposal. And so early on, we not only provided a broad set of availability of the tools to our employees, we provided training, we provided support, we provided mentoring, we provided coaching. And so now you jump forward a few years, we're seeing real productivity improvements. You know, it was on the earnings call, I think you mentioned, I talked about some of the improvements we're seeing in our product and tech organizations. Like we're seeing 80% more code commits from our teams. I mean, that's a significant increase. We're seeing kind of an 80% reduction in the time it takes to design and build a product, 80%. You know, we're seeing 65% faster feature development. And those are just a few statistics. If you're kind of inside the company, you would see just the pace and speed of what our teams are able to build and ultimately deploy has accelerated significantly. And, you know, we see it in market. You know, we see it with our clients. They're getting more services and more products from us that have product market fit in the specific markets than we were ever able to do. And, you know, we're also seeing productivity and effectiveness improvements across the organization, whether it's, you know, HR, marketing, finance, disputes, you know, all of those types of client service, all those types of organizations as well.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

So thinking of the AI theme, I want to talk about how it's impacting kind of customer demand. We've heard a lot about a heightened focus on cybersecurity in the wake of some of the recent Frontier Model releases. What impact is that having on your conversations with clients and maybe just broadly the types of products that you're bringing to market with some of the improved productivity that you mentioned?

Speaker 2

This is a top three issue for every client I talk to around the world. and you know as one of their most trusted partners they're looking for our advice support products and services to help them continue to defend their company in the broader ecosystem so it's a top tier challenge for our partners maybe going through a couple of the things that you mentioned we were in the the project last wing and you know one of the the first companies that had access to the Mythos model. And we invested a significant amount of resources to use that model to test and understand vulnerabilities in our company. You know, luckily, we didn't identify any vulnerabilities that could have been taken advantage from the outside, but we identified a lot of vulnerabilities in the systems. And, you know, we put the tool to work to fix those things. as part of that journey we built a harness and again months and hundreds of man hours were expended to build a tool that we then could use to use mythos and other models to identify remediate and fix and what we did is we open source that harness to the world we publish it on github we're the only company that I know of that is has done this we made it available for free in part because we wanted our clients to have access to a harness that they could use to deploy, if they didn't have mythos, other models to protect their own company. That then has led to a lot of follow-on work where we're working side-by-side with our advisory teams inside of these companies around the world to put this agentic harness to work to help them protect their company. So that's kind of one example where we've been working with our clients. We also rolled out the Visa Threat Intelligence Harness, which is another set of capabilities that puts all of our proven cyber and fraud capabilities to work that our clients consume themselves to then protect their environment. So whether it's, you know, open sourcing the harness, our advisory teams, our own products and services, we can talk if you want about the company we announced that we were acquiring called BioCatch, which is a company that, you know, already serves many companies on the planet and has billions of users where they're protecting them from cyber risks, this is a huge opportunity for us to serve our clients and to help them on an issue that they really need help with.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

So maybe let's go there on Biocatch. You recently announced this acquisition, broadening Visa's reach into the broader cybersecurity space. How do you think about the strategic implications of adding that company to the portfolio?

Speaker 2

Yeah, so we've long served our clients in helping them manage and reduce transaction risk. We have well-proven products and services in our risk and security value-added services business that have helped essentially when you use your Visa card or any card, help merchants and banks identify that fraud and stop it. But what, building on the topic we were just talking about, but what our clients need more from us is they need solutions that go upstream into identity. Identity has become a critical area of vulnerability, and that's what BioCatch allows us to do, is provide a service to our clients where they can protect your identity on your mobile devices before a transaction happens so that we can help our clients avoid the identity theft that might ultimately lead to a fraudulent transaction. So strategically, we're going up the stack and moving up to provide products and services that can help our clients manage that identity risk in a cyber perspective, which ultimately should also lead to fewer fraudulent transactions.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

That leads nicely into the next topic, which is value-added services. This has been kind of a standout performer this past year, representing approximately 30% of net revenue and growing at an impressive 34% in the most recent quarter. Some of the growth obviously has been driven by some of the global events that have happened, but I think you made it pretty clear on the earnings call that all four of the VAS portfolio sleeves are growing faster than their historical growth rates. So maybe with that context, how are you thinking about the sustainability of VAS growth into next year, and particularly as you lap some of these major events?

Speaker 2

We feel this goes all the way back, I think, maybe to the first question you asked me. We, several years ago, identified kind of these market opportunities, the TAMs, the competitive sets, and so on and so forth. we've then built and shipped a bunch of product to help our clients with these needs and acquired some companies that we've built into our portfolio as well. And you're now seeing, I think, the fly wheel that's working in that context, which ties back to your first question. All of the value added services businesses, I think, are performing quite well right now. If I just kind of walk through and give you some examples, you know, our issuer business, we do a whole bunch of different things, you know, for our clients and our issuer business. You mentioned, you know, kind of the FIFA-related things that we've done at the marketing, but we also, we have a broad-based benefits platform, as an example, where we provide to banks all around the world all types of benefits that they then provide to their cardholders, whether those be lounge benefits or travel benefits or subscription benefits. You know, we're able to secure these assets at scale and then deliver them through, you know, to our clients and partners. So we've been growing penetration of that product set, but also we've been growing cards. And as we work with our issuers to issue more cards around the world, you know, our credential growth has been growing kind of 6%, 7%, 7% plus percent around the world. That then helps fuel further growth in the issuing revenue. We talked about, you know, risk and identity, and there's a lot of product that we're putting, you know, to market, you know, there as well. You know, in the acceptance space – oh, by the way, I was going to mention up an issuer, the PISMO, you know, platform. You might want to talk about that. We can talk more about that. That's, you know, that's been, I think, a good success, you know, scaling. You know, tokens is another example. As we've scaled our tokens around the world, that gives us a distribution platform for more risk and identity solutions and transaction solutions as well. And so, you know, the strategy is working. The TAM, if you look at the TAM by issuer and acceptance and risk and identity and advisory, we're still very low single digits in terms of the opportunity that we've captured. The competitive set in each of these areas is different, but, you know, we feel really good about our right to win. So, you know, we feel good about the future in FAS.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

So maybe let's talk about Pisma. That was the next topic I wanted to hit on. I mean, the company's made significant strides since the acquisition. You've expanded into a bunch of new markets. I think probably the big headline this year was the win with Wells Fargo to power their consumer DDAs. So two kind of products, please, on issuer processing and then on core. On the processing side, you now have a full stack debit and credit processing platform. What do you see as the main benefits to the client experience of working with Visa now that you have that platform? And then on the core side, maybe you just talk about the topic of core modernization in general, something that's been very slow to take place within a lot of the banks. How do you see that evolving over time, and where do you see the greatest demand for that?

Speaker 2

I think it's helpful to put in context and go back to what was our thesis, why did we buy PISMO? As I and others traveled around the world and talked to clients, there were two challenges that they were running into. One is you had a lot of bank CEOs who, in fact, most bank CEOs were either had decided or were contemplating a move to the cloud. The second thing that we kept running into was as more and more, especially fintechs, wanted to expand quickly to emerging markets and other geographies around the world, they couldn't find an issuer processing stack that was global enough, nimble enough, cloud native, which is how they built all of their businesses. and that was important for our growth, right, helping them ultimately scale. So those were the two theses that led us to really scour the world for the best technology management team and platform, and ultimately we found Pismo, which was based down in Brazil. So that's kind of how we got to this place. And then over the last couple years, we've been working to scale that platform. On the two questions, Will, that you asked. On the first, as it relates to issuer processing, Let me do U.S. and then non-U.S. Okay, in the U.S., we've had a debit processing, I would argue the leading debit processing, issuer processing stack for many, many years. It's called Visa DPS. We serve banks, you know, big and small with that stack. Now, with the combination of PISMO, which has debit, credit, prepaid, you know, commercial, full-stack issuer processing capabilities, you know, we're able to selectively bring that full stack together where there's market opportunity. And what we've found is there is some market opportunity at small and mid-sized banks that are looking to have an integrated credit-debted issuer processing solution. It allows them to be more nimble. It simplifies how they run their stack. And with Pismo and DPS, we're able to combine the best of both worlds for small, mid-sized banks and fintechs who want to have one issuer processing stack for all of those products.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

So we announced recently that, you know, we were going to market with that capability.

Speaker 2

We expect that the largest and most sophisticated issuers will continue to run, you know, their highly customized credit and debit stack separately, and, you know, we continue to expect DPS to be a winner on the debit side of that space. If you go outside the U.S., you know, we're starting to see some similar dynamics around people looking for integrated issuer processing stacks and those capabilities, and, you know, we've had a lot of good success using the PISMO asset to capture that. Okay, on core banking, you know, core banking, like you, I think, were saying, you know, there have been few big banks around the world that have actually made the move to the cloud. You know, The big ones, you can probably count them on one hand, but there's a lot of them that are considering it. They're working on it. They know that they will be better and can be better at serving their clients if they can operate a core that's in the cloud. It's just a lot more agile, move more quickly, deploy products more quickly to market. And we're in all of those conversations. And I think Pismo has had a lot of success, and we expect we'll continue to have a lot of success with banks of all types around the world.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Yeah, makes sense. Okay. I want to pivot to agentic commerce. I think this has been one of the kind of most obvious connections with payments and the broader theme of AI and how that's kind of infecting the entire world. Visa has been really active in that space, Visa Intelligent Commerce, Trusted Agent Protocol, the recent collaboration with OpenAI. I think at the same time, the conversation around autonomous consumer payments seems to have subsided a bit. Many questions remaining around how to verify agents, how to verify intent, who verifies identity. So what do you view as the key barriers to scaling agentic transactions from here? And what do you think the role of Visa and the broader payments ecosystem in agentic commerce will be?

Speaker 2

We remain very optimistic about the agentic commerce opportunity, by the way, for us as a company, but also for you all as consumers. We're seeing a lot of adoption among consumers of using these tools for shopping, the top of the funnel, for discovery. My guess is many of you in the room are similar to myself and other consumers, which is you're using your favorite LLM or platform to compare things, to shop for things, to identify things, but then you're still going to the seller website to complete the transaction. So I've seen adoption for shopping, not yet for the autonomous payments. The barrier that you described, if I had to describe it in one word, it would be trust. Sellers need to trust that agents that are coming into their environment and their websites are actual, real, purpose-driven agents that users like Will have empowered to go make transactions at their website. That's why, you know, we've been building things. I think you mentioned the trusted agent protocol, trusted agent directory. We think that Visa can play an important role in building trust on the seller side of the ecosystem. The second part of the trust equation is consumers, is all of us. We're going to announce tomorrow something we call the Visa Trust Index. We've done research with consumers asking them, do you trust these agentic platforms to go make payments on their own with your money and your financial information? And not surprisingly, most say no. Three out of four consumers say no. They don't trust that to happen. If you ask them if Visa's involved, do you trust your agent to go make payments on your behalf, 61% of them say yes. that I trust. So you go from one out of four saying, you know, I trust to 60 plus percent. And if you ask the most engaged users, the ones that are using these LLMs at least once a week, that goes up to more than 70 percent. So I think we can play an incredibly important role using the capabilities that you mentioned to deliver trust to the buyer side of the ecosystem and the seller side of the ecosystem.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

And as we build out the capabilities that enable this agentic web, I think will play a very important role in all of that makes sense let's pivot just stable coins I think so visa is part of the open standard joint venture and the launch of you open USD you've also introduced the visa stable coin platform so can you talk about the strategic rationale behind supporting another stable coin how does OUSD differ from some of the existing stable coins that are out there and what are the primary focus areas for enabling stable coin payments?

Speaker 2

Yeah, so we are big believers in the product market fit for stable coins in a couple different areas. One is, you know, there's probably 50 countries around the world where consumers and families and businesses have wanted to hold on to U.S. dollars essentially in a bank account for generations, but they haven't been able to, whether it was for cost reasons or availability reasons or others. And then the second is cross-border, whether that be remittances or B2B cross-border. And we view all of that as opportunities for Visa. And so that's why we're focused on the space. And we're spending a lot of time building product kind of across the stack for stable coins, starting at the level of the blockchains, moving up to issuance, moving up to wallets, and then the orchestration and infrastructure layer, and then ultimately the application layer. We have teams working against each level of that stack. You mentioned, you know, OUSD. OUSD, you know, has a potential to be a very relevant stablecoin purposeful for payments. You know, I think what, I think you asked what differentiates OUSD in the standard is shared economics and neutral governance. And we think it's quite possible that those two elements of design of OUSD could help OUSD become an extremely relevant stablecoin globally in the areas where I said that there's product market fit. If you go back down to the bottom of the stack, you know, we've been active as a validator on several payments, purpose-built blockchains, you know, with Tempo and ARK and Canton, we're a super validator. And because we're involved at the base level of those blockchains, we're involved in the protocols that got put out, the standards that get deployed and those types of things. You know, if you go all the way up to the, you know, the application layer, you know, stablecoin issuance has been quite a successful business for us. We have more than 200 stablecoin issuance programs in 50 countries now, you know, around the world that are empowering users who have stablecoin balances in their favorite wallet to be able to go spend those balances without having to think about how do I convert it from, you know, USDC into whatever fiat currency, maybe, you know, Argentinian pesos or something like that, we abstract the user from all that complexity and say, just go use your Visa card, you know, and we'll take, you know, we'll take care of all that for you. So, you know, those are just some of the areas where we're focused. You mentioned the Visa Stablecoin platform as well. That is a platform we deployed to largely our issuer partners to make it easier for them to participate in a lot of things that are going on in stablecoins, whether that's to participate with OUSD or to participate with settlement on the Visa network and things like that as well. So you'll see a lot more from us across all those different layers of the stablecoin stack focused on those two opportunities, those 50 countries around the world and cross-border. Great.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Okay. I wanted to pivot to competitive dynamics. Obviously, always an evolving landscape. The payments industry has always been very competitive. I think Visa has had some pretty big wins this year. I think you've had some in the travel space, some in cross-border. You announced the NatWest win on the most recent earnings call. Can you talk about what the conversations have been like with issuers, maybe how they've changed over the last couple of years, and how you see some of those decisioning factors that they're indexing on impacting some of the negotiations? Sure.

Speaker 2

So winning as an issuer around the world and serving your clients has become a lot more You know, if you're a big issuer, small issuer, FinTech issuer, you know, a traditional financial institution, keeping up with the pace of innovation and delivering products and services that are going to keep the most sophisticated users engaged and on their stack and on their platform, it's just become a lot harder. So issuers are looking for partners that can help them lead and win in that innovation arms race that they're all competing in right now. And, you know, if you go, again, back to the first question we were talking about, we've put a lot of work in over the last several years to deploying product and innovation and capabilities in service of our issuers and helping them win, and that's helping us become, you know, their preferred partner. the the kind of the conversations that you asked about they've also become much more complex and sophisticated right issuers are not just looking for us as a partner in consumer payments we're bringing them opportunities in commercial payments in visa direct in value-added services which we've spoken about they're looking for you know processing capabilities not just issuer but core and all those types of things so it's become a lot more complicated a lot more complex and a lot more important, honestly, to our partners than it ever has been. And I think when they're choosing Visa, the feedback that we get is they're choosing our people. We just have outstanding people. And when you're a client of Visa, day in and day out, there's the products and the tech and the brand, but you need world-class people to help you put those to work in service of them growing their business. So we feel like we have the best team on the planet and they're helping us win. The Visa brand is a significant differentiator in 200 countries and territories around the world. Our tech stack, you know, the modernized tech stack and Visa as a service stack that we're putting to work for our clients is a big differentiator. Our value-added services, you know, are a differentiator in terms of why consumers are choosing Visa. And, you know, all those things, you know, when we win are reasons clients tell us that they chose us.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Okay, got a couple minutes left here. I wanted to go through a couple of more specific topics, starting with cross-border, which has always been a big driver of growth in the business, you mentioned earlier in the update this quarter, still growing faster than the core business. As you look across the cross-border money movement capabilities that Visa has, whether it's on the consumer side and push payments, disbursements, where do you see the biggest opportunity to sustain or even accelerate some of the cross-border flows on the network?

Speaker 2

We see big opportunities in consumer payments. We see big opportunities in our Visa Direct platform. We see big opportunities in our commercial and B2B. I mean, significant, significant opportunities. Like in the consumer payments business, I mean, there's still $2 trillion of TAM, a lot of which is still spent in cash and check. As hard as that is to believe sitting in a conference room in San Francisco, very true in many markets around the world. And so we're investing to expand our acceptance in those markets. We're investing in marketing, targeting users, making sure they know they can use their Visa credential when they're traveling. We're investing in programs to create benefits. We have something called the Visa Destinations Program that allows Visa users to get special curated benefits when they travel to these marquee markets. So consumer payments continues to be a tremendous opportunity. And, by the way, you know, one of the biggest assets and differentiated assets that we have around the world, the ability for a user to wake up in almost any country around the world and travel to almost any other country around the world and not have to worry about how they're going to pay for things. Anybody in the audience who might have traveled to San Francisco here from outside the country, I'm guessing, you know, you focused on what to pack in your suitcase, but you didn't worry about how you were going to pay for things because you can use your Visa credential anywhere, you know, around the hotel here. So that's one. The second is Visa Direct. You know, our Visa Direct platform now has 18 billion endpoints on it all around the world, accounts, cards, wallets, and we're putting that network to use in service of lots of different partners, whether that's, you know, P2P use cases or B2C use cases or C2B use cases, and cross-border is an area where that, I think, is a very differentiated asset. And then the B2B space as well. You know, we talk a little bit about it with stablecoins, but I think B2B represents a meaningful set of opportunities, especially for higher-value cross-border transactions where we can put our products to work.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Makes sense. Okay, I wanted to talk on the regulatory environment, particularly in Europe. You know, I think there's this broader theme around payments nationalism and the push for sovereign payment infrastructure. How is Visa engaging with European regulators and governments to kind of navigate some of the sovereignty concerns? and then specifically how are you evaluating some of the recent developments in Europe around WIRO and the latest pan-European payment schemes?

Speaker 2

So sovereignty concerns and those types of things are not a new issue in Europe or anywhere else in the world. We've been engaging for many, many years with both our partners and also elected officials and regulators on this topic for many, many years. In Europe specifically, it's also been a topic for many years, But, you know, it's become an even elevated topic in recent years. And, you know, we're doing what we've always continued to do, which is engage locally, build locally, have great local teams locally. In Europe, we recently announced a 500 million euro incremental investment in Europe, data center in Europe, more offices in Europe, a headquarters in Frankfurt, an innovation center in Poland. You know, a lot more people on the ground in our, you know, 20 or so offices that, you know, span from Iceland down to Turkey. So, you know, we're doing what we do is invest more locally. Now, Europe, you asked about Wero. I mean, Europe has had and has been building out domestic alternatives for many, many years. You know, they've got domestic card networks, Carbancare, Redsis, Troy, others. They have a thriving digital wallet ecosystem before you even get to Wero, whether it's, you know, Swish or Vips or BISM in Spain and many, many others. And they're all, you know, having good success. So it's a very, very competitive market with domestic alternatives and has been for many years. And, you know, Wiro will be another domestic wallet. You know, they're off to a good start, and I expect that they'll make progress and provide even more competition, you know, to the European market, which is thriving today. So the market's competitive. It'll get more competitive. There'll be even more domestic alternatives, and, you know, we'll continue to do what we do, which is invest locally, hopefully win locally, and serve our clients as partners and help them thrive.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Got it. Okay. Last question here. I wanted to ask about the investment philosophy, particularly with, you know, the company continuing to operate at industry-leading margins. You recently announced a workforce reduction. How are you balancing, you know, maintaining those healthy margins while also continuing the investing in the business? You announced some specific investments, for instance, in the European market just now, you know, where are you directing incremental investments today?

Speaker 2

Yeah, so the, you know, the reduction workforce that you referenced is really a step on a journey for us. You know, we've been on a journey for the last, you know, three-plus years of trying to run the company more efficiently, more effectively, more accurately in service of our clients, and through that, free up incremental resources to then be able to invest more in marketing and products and salespeople and offices and data centers and all those types of things that hopefully drive this flywheel of continued growth. And, you know, we're just continuing to work our way through it. We're very blessed in that we have significant investment, significant ROI investment opportunities ahead of us in consumer payments, in value-added services, and CMS. And the more we can free up resources to invest in those opportunities, hopefully the more effective we can be serving our clients and driving growth.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

That's great.

Speaker 2

Well, I think that's all the time we had. Ryan, thank you for joining us.

Will, Interviewer/Moderator

Thanks for having me. Great to be here, Will.