Mastercard Incorporated

Good morning. My name is Brandi, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the MasterCard second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. I would now like to turn the call over to Warren Nishaw, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Nishaw, you may begin.

Thank you, Brandi. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our second quarter 2019 earnings call. With me today are Ajay Banga, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Sachin Mehra, our Chief Financial Officer. Following comments from Ajay and Sachin, the operator will announce your opportunity to get into the queue for the Q&A session. It is only then that the queue will open for questions. You can access our earnings release, supplemental performance data, and the slide deck that accompany this call in the investor relations section of our website, MasterCard.com. Additionally, the release was furnished with the SEC earlier this morning. Our comments today regarding our financial results will be on a non-GAAP currency neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. As a reminder, starting this quarter, we have updated our non-GAAP methodology to exclude the impact of gains or losses on our equity investments. We are excluding these items as we believe this will facilitate a better understanding of our operating performance and provide a meaningful comparison of our results between periods. For the three and six months just ended, net gains of $143 million and $148 million have been excluded. Prior year periods were not restated as the impact of the change was de minimis. Non-GAAP measures also exclude the impact of special items, which represent litigation judgments and settlements and certain one-time items. In addition, we present growth rates adjusted for the impact of foreign currency. Both the release and the slide deck include reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP-reported amounts. Finally, as set forth in more detail in our earnings release, I would like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements regarding MasterCard's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Information about the factors that could affect future performance are summarized at the end of our earnings release and in our recent SEC filings. A replay of this call will be posted on our website for 30 days. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Rajiv Anga.

Thanks, Warren, and good morning, everybody. So our strong performance continued this quarter, revenues up 15%, EPS is up 17% versus the year ago on a non-GAAP currency neutral basis as Warren just said. These results reflect the continued execution of our strategy as we invest for long-term growth. On the macroeconomic environment, consumer sentiment and spending remains relatively strong with some moderation versus 2018 as expected. We are continuing to monitor ongoing trade negotiations and other economic and geopolitical factors, which are showing signs of weighing on business sentiment in particular. In the U.S., we are seeing continued growth, low unemployment, healthy consumer confidence. Retail sales grew 3.2% versus a year ago, ex-auto, ex-gas, according to our spending pulse estimates. And that reflects some moderation from Q1 and from last year. In Europe, the outlook is mostly unchanged as we continue to see modest growth. UK retail spending remains healthy, although it has slowed somewhat from Q1 according to our spending pulse estimates. And of course, the uncertainty around Brexit remains. In Asia Pacific, trade tensions continue to weigh on business sentiment, particularly in China. We are, however, seeing improved consumer confidence and more accommodative monetary policies in several markets there. And the outlook in Latin America continues to be mixed as growth in markets like Brazil, Colombia, and Chile are partially offset by weakness in Argentina and Mexico. Meanwhile, we continue to drive healthy double-digit volume and transaction growth for MasterCard across most of our markets by successfully executing against our strategy. And I'm going to give you a few examples of how we are growing our core business, diversifying our customer base, and building new areas for our business. So starting with growing our core, we continue to make good progress driving growth across our credit, debit, prepaid, and commercial products, and expanding acceptance across both physical and digital channels. We expanded a number of important issuer relationships in the credit space, including National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, where we secured full exclusivity across their credit, debit, prepaid, and commercial business, along with flipping their credit portfolio. We also signed a new consumer and small business co-brand partnership in the US with Houzz, a rapidly growing online home remodeling marketplace. And we won a 10-year exclusive co-brand credit deal with Despega, a leading online travel agency in Latin America, in five new markets across the region. As with many of our other co-brands, Despega will integrate our loyalty program into their offering to deepen their customer engagement. In Germany, we have renewed our credit relationship with DZ Bank, the second largest retail banking group in the country, and they represent hundreds of cooperative banks across the country, and they will continue to issue MasterCard cards to their customers. Turning to debit, we signed an agreement in the UK with Nationwide who selected us as their business debit card provider due to our experience in the small business space and our demonstrated expertise of working with FinTech. Now, Nationwide plans to launch a new business banking proposition to over 5 million small businesses in the UK early next year. In Colombia, we won an exclusive debit partnership with Scotiabank and secured long-term debit agreements with Bancolombia and Davivienda, the two largest debit issuers in the country. And in Germany, we extended our long-standing partnership with the German savings bank group Sparkation. Collectively, these debit renewals will leverage a series of MasterCard services to help drive contactless adoption, advance digital security, and accelerate the migration of Maestro to debit MasterCard. In terms of the secure remote commerce initiative, we are making good progress. In June, AMVCO launched the new SRC payment icon and technical specs. We are currently testing SRC in market with issuers and merchants. We're actively working on Masterpass upgrades to SRC with partners like Tickets.com, Expedia Group, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Norwegian Cruise Line, and we expect to launch in the United States in the next few months. And then we have developed the MasterCard Digital Wellness Program, which will provide merchants with access to a host of technologies and resources, including a standards-compliant click-to-pay checkout, but most importantly, added security through tokenization and AI technology along with cybersecurity resources to combat online attacks. We're working with payment processors and platforms such as WorldPay, Square, Ardian, Stripe, and of course our own MasterCard payment gateway services to make these unique features through the MasterCard digital wellness program available to merchants. So let me turn now to the second pillar of our strategy, where we are continuing to diversify our business by expanding across new geographies and customers. An example in India, where as you know, we're building partnerships with local retailers and issuers to help drive growth and further develop the payment ecosystem. We're pleased to have launched an exclusive credit co-brand program with Slipkart, the largest online retailer in India. In addition, Paytm Payments Bank has signed a new issuance agreement with MasterCard. We've also established a new acquiring relationship with them to drive open-loop acceptance with them in that market in India. Paytm will also be using our SEND capability to enable credit card bill payments. We're leveraging our assets to design unique solutions for specific verticals, such as the growing gig economy. We were selected as the network for the Lyft Direct MasterCard debit card, which provides Lyft drivers with instant access to their earnings. Collaborating with Evolve Bank and Trust and Branch, who will issue MasterCard prepaid cards and will utilize MasterCard Send to help their corporate customers provide interest fee pay advances to their early workers. And in Mexico, we've partnered with Uber and BBVA to provide a new MasterCard debit card for Uber drivers. Working in the fintech space, I believe we just continue to lead there. We've established a series of successful partnerships with fintechs around the world who value the services we provide as well as our solution selling approach. This quarter, we signed a deal with Rails Bank to bring new consumer and commercial debit card programs to market in the UK. And in Brazil, we are working with digital bank Banqui and Via Varejo to offer a new digital prepaid card targeting their approximately 60 million customers. So now on to the third pillar of our strategy, focused on building new areas for our business. We have developed and acquired, as you know, a broad set of capabilities, which together with our existing card rails allow us to differentiate our offerings, address new payment flows, and most importantly, operate as a one-stop shop for our customers. And let me give you a few examples. First, we recently announced a partnership with P27 Nordic Payments Platform, owned by six of the largest banks in the Nordics, to provide a leading-edge real-time and batch multi-currency payment platform across the region. This new platform leverages our VocaLink assets, will replace the existing payments infrastructure and provide instant and secure payments across the region. And I believe this partnership represents another milestone in our strategy to offer customer choice in the form of real-time, account-to-account payments infrastructure, applications, and services, and builds on a series of wins across Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East that I've highlighted to you over the last few quarters. Second, we continue to build additional depth and scale in our cross-border capabilities, which already allow us to disperse payments across bank accounts, mobile wallets, and cards all through a single API. For example, we just completed the acquisition of TransFast, which will not only enable us to service a greater number of markets and endpoints for our customers, TransFast, by the way, allows us to reach over 90% of the world's population, but also provides a suite of leading compliance, ethics, messaging, and licensing capabilities to address many of the cross-border pain points that exist today. We're executing our cross-border strategy through a new partnership agreement with Interac in Canada, which leverages our MasterCard send push payment capabilities to allow Canadians to send money internationally across Interact's e-transfer platform. The National Bank of Canada will be the first issuer to launch this new international remittance solution. We're developing new capabilities to penetrate the bill payment space and completing the acquisition of transactors to accelerate our go-to-market strategy for the MasterCard bill pay exchange. Transactics offers a unique combination of technical assets, distribution partnerships, and customer relationships, which when combined with our current bill pay exchange capabilities, will allow consumers to view, manage, and pay bills across multiple payment methods and channels, whether via real-time account-to-account payments or card rails, on your mobile banking app, or through a biller's website. And finally, in B2B, we announced a partnership to integrate our MasterCard track with the Open Text Supplier Portal to help buyers and suppliers in the automotive industry streamline and digitize financial supply chain processes to increase the speed, compliance, and security associated with business information, payments, and financing. With that, let me turn the call over to Sachin for an update on our financial results and operational metrics. Sachin?

Thanks, Ajay, and good morning, everyone. So turning to page three, you will see we continue to perform well. Here are a few highlights on a currency-neutral basis and excluding both special items related to certain legal matters as well as the impact of gains and losses on the company's equity investments. Net revenue grew 15%, driven by solid momentum in our core and was slightly ahead of our expectations due to stronger services growth. Acquisitions contributed a minimal amount to net revenue in the quarter. Total operating expenses increased 17%, which includes a 2 PPT increase related to acquisitions and a 5 PPT increase related to the differential in hedging gains and losses versus a year ago. The remaining 10% relates to our ongoing investment in strategic initiatives. Operating income and net income each grew by 15%, reflecting our strong operating performance, and each includes a one PPT reduction due to acquisitions. EPS was $1.89, including a two cent drag related to our recent acquisitions. EPS growth was 17% year-over-year, with share repurchases contributing $0.04 per share. During the quarter, we repurchased about $1.9 billion worth of stock and an additional $493 million through July 25, 2019. So let's turn to page four, where you can see the operational metrics for the second quarter. Gross dollar volume, or GDV, growth was 13% on a local currency basis, up 1 ppt from last quarter, in part due to the ramping of co-brand wins in the U.S., as well as fewer processing days in Q1. U.S. GDV grew 10% up approximately 2 ppt from last quarter, with credit and debit growth of 12% and 8% respectively. Outside of the U.S., volume growth was 14%, up 1 ppt from last quarter. Cross-border volume grew at 16% on a local currency basis, in line with expectations and driven by double-digit growth in all regions. Turning to page 5, switch transactions continued to show strong growth at 18% globally, reflecting in part the continued adoption of contactless. we saw healthy double-digit growth in switch transactions across all regions. In addition, card growth was 6%. Globally, there are 2.6 billion MasterCard and Maestro-branded cards issued. Now let's turn to page 6 for highlights on a few of the revenue line items, again described on a currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. The 15% net revenue increase was primarily driven by strong transaction and volume growth, as well as growth in our services offerings, partially offset by rebates and incentives. Looking quickly at the individual revenue line items, you'll see that domestic assessments grew 13% in line with worldwide GDP growth of 13%. Cross-border volume fees grew 19%, while cross-border volume grew 16%. The three PPT difference is mainly driven by pricing, partially offset by mix. Transaction processing fees grew 15%, while switch transactions grew 18%. The difference is primarily due to mix. Finally, other revenues were particularly strong this quarter, up 24%, driven by growth in our cyber and intelligence and data and services solutions. Acquisitions contributed to PPT to this growth. Moving to page seven, you can see that on a currency neutral basis, excluding special items, total operating expenses increased 17%. As I just said, this includes seven PPT related to acquisitions and the differential in hedging gains and losses versus a year ago. The remaining 10 PPT of growth relates to our continued investment in strategic initiatives, such as digital enablement, safety and security, and geographic expansion. Turning to slide eight, let's discuss what we've seen through the first three weeks of July where each of our drivers are at or slightly ahead of what we saw in Q2. The numbers through July 21st are as follows. Starting with switched volume, we saw global growth of 16%. In the U.S., our switched volume grew 13% up one PPT from the second quarter due to the timing of certain Social Security payments this quarter. Switch volume outside the US grew 19%, also up 1 ppt, primarily driven by Europe. Globally, switch transaction growth was 19%, a sequential increase of 1 ppt, primarily driven by the US and Europe. With respect to cross-border, our volumes grew 16% globally, similar to the second quarter. Looking ahead, our expectations for 2019 are consistent with our prior estimates. We had a solid first half and we continue to grow our business both in terms of new and renewed deals as well as with our service offerings. We continue to see healthy consumer spending with some moderation versus a year ago as expected. In terms of net revenue, on a currency neutral basis and excluding acquisitions, we continue to expect to grow at a low teens rate for the year. On this same basis, For the third quarter, we also expect to grow at a low teens rate because of a sequential increase in deal activity as well as some moderation of services growth versus a very strong Q2. We expect FX to be a two PPT headwind to revenue for the year and about a one to two PPT headwind for the quarter. In addition, acquisitions will add about one PPT to third quarter revenue growth. For operating expenses on a currency-neutral basis, excluding both special items and acquisitions, we continue to expect growth at the high end of high single digits for the year. On the same basis, for the third quarter, we expect growth in the mid-teens versus a year ago due to the timing of marketing spend, which is more heavily weighted to Q3 this year as we promote contactless usage and investment sponsorships. Year-over-year, FX will be the tailwind to OPEX of about 1 ppt for both the year and Q3. In addition, acquisitions will add about 5 ppt to third quarter OPEX growth. As a reminder, we issued $2 billion in debt at the end of May, and this will impact our interest expense run rate going forward. In terms of the tax rate, we now expect it to be approximately 19% for the year. With that, let me turn the call back to Warren to begin the Q&A session.

Randy, we're now ready for the question and answer session.

At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of George Mihalos with Cowen.

Yes, and congrats on another strong quarter. Ajay, wanted to ask a question. You brought up contactless. Obviously, that's been a good driver. How long does it take when you introduce contactless, or how long do you think it'll take as you introduce it in sort of a new geography for it to really peak up and meaningfully drive, I guess, accelerated growth?

So contactless basically targets low-value cash transactions as the first place that it kind of changes the paradigm. And the speed of adoption changes We've got now 10, 12 markets around the world where contactless has grown very strongly. Australia, Canada, Turkey, Poland, Hungary and the likes, UK. It depends a great deal on how many cars are in the market that are contactless enabled, combined with contactless terminals, combined with the use case for everyday payments. So if the transport system gets contactless enabled, it tends to ramp faster. If it doesn't, it tends to ramp slower. So if you take Australia as an example, where the banks, the acquirers, and the merchant community worked really hard together on promoting contactless. It went from non-existent to being like close to 80% of all transactions under $100 Australian were contactless in four to five years after launch. It was not that case in other markets, but I'd say four or five years to get to a really large percentage of small-dollar transactions with all the effort in the market is a pretty good number.

Next question, please.

Your next question comes from Tin Jin Wong with J.P. Morgan.

Hey, thanks. Good growth here again. If you don't mind, a couple quick ones, just on the stronger services growth. Maybe can you be more specific? You mentioned cyber and data. I'm curious if these are project-related issues. or more recurring type work? Maybe just a little bit more there. And then just on the payback on your M&A, I know you gave that third quarter outlook, which is helpful. Is the payback on those types of deals outside of the traditional retail card space and bill pay and remittance, et cetera, is it different than what we've seen in the past? Thank you.

Great, Injun. Let me take a first cut, and then Sachin being far more comprehensive on numbers will probably correct me, but here we go. The first part is the services revenue. A lot of the cyber revenue has recurring components built into it because it involves the selling of AI and other products that are sold into banks and merchants and governments in a way that they tend to have reutilization quarter after quarter. What would change is if the volumes going through them change, then our revenue profile from them will obviously change because it's not dissimilar to our card business in that if the volume goes through our cards, we earn more. That's kind of the first part. What is improving our capability in cyber and intelligence, aside from our own efforts at developing new tools and the acquisitions of criteria and new data and all the work we're doing, what's improving it is we now see a much larger percentage of our transactions than we used to 10 years ago. We are now seeing 55, 56% of our transactions. It used to be 40-something percent. Every time you see more transactions, the predictive power of your AI tools improves. That second part, by the way, impacts some of our data business as well. But on the CNI space, it tends to be more recurring. The data and services space, some aspects of them are recurring. Some of them are one-off projects. Sachin referred to the fact that you should expect that the third quarter in services may be a little slower in growth than the second quarter, primarily caused by the fact that the 2Q had enormous growth rates. But part of that is lapping of our comparison to prior year, but part of that is some projects in part of our business, like in D&I. So that's kind of the D&S, sorry. These acronyms confuse me, but the data business. And so you've got... a mix inside our business, where the cyber business is more recurring, the data business is a fairly high proportion of recurring, but it does have some project-related work as well.

Yeah, and, Jinjin, I'll just add to that. So, like Kajay said, right, so in the second quarter, first, this number moves around quarter to quarter. As you've seen, even last year, in the first quarter of last year, we had very strong services growth take place. And, you know, that's a little bit of function of What are the projects which are being delivered in a particular quarter which cause for things to move between quarter and quarter? And that's particularly on the advisor's side. So I would tell you in the second quarter, our advisor's growth came in slightly stronger, which would be in line with what Ajay said on the consulting side of our business. On the second part of your question on M&A, Look, I mean, we've shared with you what we think the dilutive impact will be for the acquisitions which have been completed. The couple of things which I'll remind you is the acquisitions have closed during the course of the second quarter. There's one acquisition, which is TransFast, which closed early in the third quarter. So all of that has been taken into consideration as we think about what our outlook for acquisitions is. We continue to expect that our acquisitions will be diluted between seven and eight cents in 2019. And as it relates to the revenue profile, these acquisitions are across different lines of what we do. So for example, The acquisition of Ethica, which is in the safety and security space, will follow a little bit more from a revenue model standpoint along the lines of what Ajay just described. Then there are other businesses such as Transactus, which is in the bill payment space, where it's a function of what kind of engagement volume we get of bill presentments coming into the business and how we charge on the basis of that. So that'll be more in the nature of per bill presented, what kind of transaction fees we charge on those bills.

Nothing's changed in our basic M&A philosophy, which is two philosophies remain. One being, we try and make sure that the dilution stops by year two, and therefore becomes in creative in the third year. Secondly, remember that by the second year, the business is embedded in the core of whatever business we're running. And therefore, we don't do an ex-acquisition after the second year, which means that discipline on buying something and making it work for you by the end of the second year is now fairly strongly embedded in every business line in the company.

Next question, please. Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Sanjay Sakrani with KBW.

Thanks. Good morning. I have a question on Europe. The growth in the region continues to remain robust and has been for some time. Could you talk about how long you expect that to persist? Because I know you've had some fintech wins and maestro conversions that have helped. And then maybe you could also speak to any visible impacts from Brexit.

Thanks. I have been saying this since the day I became CEO, that Europe is a growth market for our company. It's now almost 10 years. I see no reason to change that prediction for you. Europe is a cash-dominant market in large parts of the continent even now. And therefore, the opportunity to convert cash in personal payments remains strong and healthy. To give you an example, just in quarter one of 2019, that's the first quarter this year, we grew merchant acceptance locations in Europe by 10% over the prior first quarter. And so, This is not a developed payments market in the sense, now having said that, the Nordics are developed, so don't get me wrong. I'm talking about most of continental Europe has got enormous opportunity for growth as yet. There's market share growth as well, which is share growth not just against our large global competitors, but also against local national schemes, all of whom are finding it hard to keep pace with technology, innovation, and regulation trends. And therefore, they tend to come to us for help and assistance, and that allows us to get a stronger foothold, even in their businesses. And so, you know, and this is all about commercial and B2B. And there's yet another space in the SME and B2B space in Europe that we're growing. So fintech, yes, of course. Regular banks, yes, of course, that's the share growth angle, but just think in terms of cash and acceptance and B2B payments. There's an enormous opportunity even now in Europe, and I remain very bullish on what Europe is capable of doing. Thank you. Next question, please. I forgot to answer the Brexit impact for Sanjay. And nothing directly yet. I mean, it's interesting. The U.K. still remains a market where people seem to be spending, and growth in spending remains healthy. So I can't tell you that I'm seeing direct impact there. But guess what? The currency is volatile. Obviously, you expect that as we get closer to October 31st, if there isn't clarity, you're going to get more volatility in the market. But consumer spending is still healthy. Inbound and outbound cross-border flows are pretty interesting yet still. I think, in fact, inbound is stronger than outbound, but the U.K. still remains an attractive market. Sorry, next question.

Your next question comes from the line of Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could maybe just comment on what you did before relative to transactions process growth. It seems like the big drivers there have been, first of all, the move to contact list, but also the reduction in maestro cards. Can you maybe just kind of give us a sense about whether there's any reason to believe that level of growth in the high teens is not sustainable from here, since it's pretty much at the highest level it's been in, I think, the last five or six years? Thank you.

Yeah, so, Jim, I'll take that one. I think you should think about our switch transaction growth across the vectors, which you just spoke about, which is as we continue to drive contactless adoption, that's going to be a helpful fact in terms of driving growth on switch transactions. The other piece is obviously the migration, which we're doing from Maestro to Debit MasterCard, which should be helpful. But the piece which we should also remain focused on is you'll see over the years the percentage of switch transactions for MasterCard as a company has increased significantly. and that continues to remain a focus area for us, which is how do we continue to engage to drive more switching over our network vis-a-vis that of local schemes. So all of these factors are, you know, helpful facts in terms of driving the switch transaction growth. Those are things which, you know, I would keep a close eye on as it relates to what the trajectory of growth would look like on a going forward basis.

Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Lisa Ellis with Moffitt Nathanson.

Hi. Good morning, guys. Ajay, I wanted to follow up on your call out that MasterCard signed an issuing agreement with Paytm in India. It seems like we're seeing an increasing number of examples of this where these digital wallets are issuing debit cards against the balances, which seems like a pretty significant competitive shift in the environment relative to a couple of years ago where many of these players would have been at least aspiring to compete with MasterCard. So can you talk about this competitive dynamic? Has it in fact shifted like this? Are you seeing this more broadly across the developing markets? And how is working with these players a little bit different than your traditional banking customers? Thank you.

So there's a lot of these guys at the end of the day, you know, some of them start out by trying to find a way to use bank account to account rails as a way of generating payments. The fact is that in so many markets around the world, debit interchange or MDRs are regulated, and therefore the economic benefit of going account to account versus going on a debit card has changed quite dramatically over the last decade. What used to be a one or two market incident of regulation has spread quite far on debit. A lot of the Asian markets, India as an example, has regulated debit card MDRs. And therefore, the economic benefits have moved around, as they have in the U.S., where debit interchange is regulated. And so as that economic benefit has changed, the tonality of the conversation has changed vis-a-vis card rails versus account-to-account rails. Meanwhile, we ourselves as a company have adopted the view that offering choice to consumers and merchants and customers about both account to account and card is a good idea. And that's why the investments in Vocalink, that's why the investments in building out infrastructure with real-time payments in the Nordics or in parts of Asia or parts of Latin America or in the Middle East Africa region. And that's why all our efforts to build applications and services on top of real-time payment rails as well. I believe out over the next decade, you will see more and more of us being sort of rail agnostic, if that's what our customers and consumers and merchants prefer. because I believe that's the best way to cater to the changing payments landscape.

Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Moshe Orenbuck with Credit Suisse.

You kind of talked a little bit about the acquisitions, and there are a number of them. What might be different about this round of acquisitions is that they're more platform, I guess, than... perhaps just getting a specific amount of revenues. And maybe could you just talk a little bit about how you think they factor in kind of over the course of the next several years?

First of all, I would say most of our acquisitions, even over the past few years, have been platform-oriented or, in a couple of cases, oriented towards skill sets we didn't have. So years ago, we bought a company called CSAM, which gave us access to 450 mobile technology engineers, which would have been quite a challenge to hire organically. But the majority of our deals, be it merchant loyalty programs or Pinpoint from Australia or these last ones, have all been platform or some service-oriented of that type. So take applied predictive technologies of the data and services space. That gave us a testing and learning platform. Or take new data that gave us AI platforms for cybersecurity. So I'd say most of our acquisitions tend to connect back to wanting to be the owner of a platform that we can add into what we have and then sell as a bundled service in our system. That's kind of what we're trying to do. So I don't see these as being dramatically different on that logic. I think what's getting interesting is that we're seeing more deal flow than we ever did. We've always seen a lot of deals and picked one or two or three out of 20, 30. We've seen many more deals in the last two years than we saw in the first five years. I think part of that is we're seen as a credible acquirer. who tries to develop the company we acquire and stitch it into the kind of businesses we have and then give people opportunities to grow and a career to grow. So we're not seen as an acquirer who comes in to plant the MasterCard way of doing things. I would tell you that things like APT and new data and have taught us a great deal that we didn't even know before we bought them. So I think they're benefiting enormously from our acquisitions both culturally for our mother company, but also in the cross-flow successes between the two of them. I don't see that very different for an Ethica or a Transactus or a Transfast or a Wise. I can see all of these flowing in similar patterns.

Okay, thank you. Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Bob Napoli with William Blair.

Thank you, and good morning. A question on B2B payments. Ajay, you had mentioned you haven't even scratched the surface internationally. I was wondering if you could maybe, Sachin, give an update on trends in that business in the U.S., growth rates, any signs of acceleration, the AP automation piece, and is the international market far behind the U.S. in the growth of B2B payments?

So our B2B business, Bob, as you know, you should think about as things we've been doing for many, many years on the commercial side, catering to the small business universe, the T&E side of the business, our fleet card management side of the business. That business continues to grow well. There still remains a lot of opportunity from a secular shift standpoint, I would tell you, in that part of the business. We continue to grow that nicely. We've got some very solid platforms, which you're familiar with, which support the growth of that commercial business. The more recent stuff which we've done as it relates to the B2B hub, again, we're seeing good interest from our customers in that. So like we've said previously, those things take time. The adoption curve on those things is something which is a multi-year adoption curve process, but still shows a lot of promise because it's solving for real pain points in the business. Then I think about the new and different stuff. For example, we announced just in RJ's comments earlier today, we talked about the partnership we've established for our MasterCard track capabilities with OpenText. Again, early days, but shows a lot of promise because it's solving for real pain points on the B2B side as it relates to compliance and onboarding of customers, in this instance, in the automotive segment. So I think you should think about our B2E business across multiple spectrums. There's business we've been in, which continues to grow healthily, which delivers revenue right now. There's other businesses we've invested in over the last few years, which are starting to show good trajectory and traction. And then there are other new things which we're doing, such as MasterCard Track, which are just getting going, which will pay off over the longer term. And not much has changed in terms of our views on the opportunity there, both in the U.S. as well as from a global market standpoint.

Is the international market further behind the U.S. market? I would imagine the opportunities are similar.

Bob, the answer to that question is yes. The answer to that question is clearly yes. We announced last quarter our partnership with MYOB, for example, in Australia. That would be an example of, you know, again, taking the lead from what we did at the B2B hub in the U.S. and taking it overseas for an opportunity which exists there as well. This quarter we talk about our agreement with Nationwide, which is primarily catering towards the small business space in Europe, again, a big opportunity there. So I think the answer really is, yes, things typically start up in the U.S., and there's opportunity globally on this as well.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Hey, good morning, guys. Just one for Sachin and one for Ajay. Just starting on the domestic assessments, it looked like the revenue growth there decelerated about 300 points in constant currency. So just wanted to get some color on the drivers there and maybe what moving parts we should be considering for the second half in that revenue line. And then maybe, Ajay, if you can just go a little further on SRC now that we're getting closer to actually live implementations. What's the plan in terms of educating consumers there? Will we see actual targeted advertising kind of like what we had seen historically with Masterpass?

So, Jason, I'll take the first one. Domestic assessments, you're right, they grew at 13% this quarter in line with our GDP growth rate of 13%. That's down sequentially from a 16% domestic assessments growth rate in Q1. That is primarily due to the lapping of certain pricing that was put in place last year. And from a trajectory standpoint, you would continue to see the pricing effect of that marginally come down as the year progresses.

And the part about SRC, yeah, once we get the testing completed and we get the current MasterPass merchants uploaded into SRC and we start rolling SRC out for the broader marketplace, you will probably see the whole industry making substantial efforts, banks, networks, acquirers, making substantial efforts on marketing and promotion. to get consumers used to the idea of the fact that this one button has the simplicity of checkout that you would expect in today's digital world. You would see that coming. But I'm talking, it's still a few months away before that kind of stuff starts.

Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Don Vendetti with Wells Fargo.

Go ahead.

Mr. Pandetti, your line is open.

Yes, Ajay. On cross-border, can you parse out a little bit the different trends in e-commerce versus T&E in terms of growth? And then just a follow-up on the commercial. I know there's been some talk in the industry that maybe it's been a little bit or some concerns around growth in commercial. Can you just clarify how you're feeling on commercial spend overall?

I'm feeling good on commercial spend overall. So that part is exactly where Sachin just answered. The part about cross-border, e-commerce cross-border growth is in the high double digits, high teens kind of thing. And that's a good number for us. Remember, it's stronger because you remember the whole crypto currency purchases stuff that we talked about? Well, that's lapped. So some part of the cross-border growth improvement quarter over quarter is the lapping of the cryptocurrency effect that you saw back in 2018. And that's the real benefit we're getting out of that. The travel kind of expense, cross-border tourism, you know, by and large, cross-border tourism is still alive and well. You would find changes in where people are going. So take China. In China, cross-border growth from Chinese cardholders is actually up this quarter over the prior quarter. But it's primarily due to increased travel, not just to what had begun to happen, which is Japan and Australia. But this quarter, you're seeing some travel to Europe, to Germany, to Canada, to the United States as well. And I, you know, that goes in and out depending on which quarter and what's going on. But by and large, travel, tourism is still intact and doing okay.

And I'll just add right here, which is we could need to see double-digit growth in cross-border volumes across all regions. And For full year 2019, we continue to expect cross-border growth rates to be in the mid-teens.

Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Keene with Deutsche Bank.

Hi, guys. Just wanted to ask about, Ajay, your comment about now seeing, you know, 55 or so percent of transactions that you guys are switching to. Can you just talk a little bit about where that percentage can go over time? Obviously, there's an economic lift there for you as well. Maybe you can talk about that throughout the model, maybe higher yields, and then it sounds like it pushes services revenues higher. So just thinking about the different implications there. Thanks.

Well, all I can tell you is I expect 55% to keep growing, but I'm not going to be able to tell you what number I expect this year, next year, the year after. The reason for its continuing growth, there are multiple reasons. One reason is that local payment schemes, as I was mentioning, struggle to keep pace with innovation technology, with cybersecurity, with regulations, and that gives opportunities for companies like ours to come and partner or happen to show that our transactions are better protected or better serviced or have more analytics behind them, and that allows us to grow. That's happening all across Europe as an example. It also happens when regulatory environments change, like some years ago they changed in Brazil, and they are beginning to change in Colombia, they are changing in Argentina, and as they change there, you tend to begin to see more of your transactions because the locally formulated scheme either no longer has control, ubiquitous control on where the transaction is routed, and the control choicing now goes to merchant or issuer. So it kind of changes the dynamic in the marketplace. That's behind some of this growth in what you're seeing. And then obviously certain kinds of technologies allow you to see more transactions. you know, contactless in many markets allows you to see more transactions than the old max stripe or chip cards could do. And so there's a number of things behind the 45 becoming 55 or the 40 something, I forget the exact number 10 years ago. I think it was 42, 43% coming up to 55 odd percent now. I expect to see that continuing to grow. And yes, the implication of that is that it does help us with the predictive power of our data, both in cyber and in our data and services businesses, and that does allow us to bundle our solutions better for merchants and banks. That is correct. Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of David Togut with Evercore.

Thanks. Good morning. Good to see your P27 partnership in the Nordics leveraging Vocalink. Can you talk more broadly about Vocalink's positioning on the European continent ahead of the launch of SCA on September 14th? And when we go live on September 14th with secure customer authentication, What do you expect to happen in terms of transaction authorization and approvals in continental Europe?

I expect a lot of fun. So let me walk you through. So September 14th is an important date, but there have also been some announcements that there will be some flexibility in the enforcement of SCA at a national level from the European Banking Authority. I think a month or two back they gave out some clarification on that. That will be interesting because you'll get some degree of friction caused by the fact that there'll be different enforcements in different countries. And I think that could lead to some consumer confusion, some merchant confusion, some issuer confusion. So we're going to have to work our way through this over the next few months as this happens. What we're trying to do is focus on our customers, help them better understand their requirements, provide them with solutions to help assist with their compliance on SCA. I continue to believe that we'll be well-advantaged during this process if we stand by them as they try and meet the needs of what the regulation of PSD2 requires. Remember that there's connected stuff around open banking there, which is everything from connecting to protecting to resolving for disputes. We're working that through with a number of countries. We've launched in the UK, launched in Poland. We're in the process of doing that kind of work in different parts of Europe. Vocalink is not the only entity that is helping us do that. It's card rails, account-to-account rails. It's actually more to do with the cyber intelligence and data services businesses that there's a lot of opportunity in PSP2 in Europe. Vocalink as a whole in Europe and in continental Europe really the Nordics would give us the first physical presence once it's fully implemented across continental Europe, because otherwise we were in the UK in the case of Europe, and no one knows where the UK will be on November 1. So this gives us a foothold on continental Europe as well by the time we get this implemented over the next few years. In the UK, all the All our contracts have been extended out by a substantial number of years on what Vocalink provides, both the BACS contract, the LINC contract, and the faster payment contract. And of course, some years later, there will be RFPs and all of those, but we are busy making sure we are well positioned for those.

Understood. And then as my follow-up, what is your expectation for the adoption of of, you know, pay-by-bank, you know, in continental Europe or consumer ACH payments, you know, once we go live September 14th?

Yeah, I don't know yet. Like I said, remember, September 14th isn't a real switch-on date. It's got some switch-on angles and it's got a bunch of demos attached to it. So the light may or may not come on fully on September 14th. Do I think pay-by-bank is a great opportunity? Yeah, just remember this. That comment I was making to Lisa earlier, the incentive to switch to paying by a bank account direct debit, the economic incentive for a merchant to help advance that or for a merchant to therefore give better benefits to their consumers to choose that as the way to pay as compared to paying by some other method has reduced as the economic difference between the MDR on debit cards and the cost of a fully loaded account to account payment are taken into account. And so this is less of an economic argument as compared to a preference argument. I consider lots of Europeans who think of paying with debit as a natural way of paying as compared to paying with credit. They think of debit as safer. I suspect a number of them will adopt pay by bank or pay by a bank account as something they understand and appeals to their way of planning for their financials. I think that's the way this will grow as compared to some very strong economic or pecuniary benefit to consumers or merchants, which means it'll be a slower build.

Thank you. Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Darren Hiller with Wolf Research.

Hey, guys. Thanks. Ajay, more broadly, I mean, your volume trends continue to remain really strong even to the July period, and you still maintain a pretty good spread versus competition across a lot of volume growth metrics. Can you just comment? I mean, is this just solid macro trends, or how much of this is actually market share in your mind, or, you know, other technology innovation driving growth? Just maybe you could try to parse out, and if you think there's anything in the economy you're seeing that would change that trend on volume any time in the next half. And then just quickly, Satchin, also, Cross-border revenue, it was up a little more account-to-card for you than the underlying cross-border underlying growth rate. Is there anything about pricing there? Can we expect that to be true?

Thanks, guys. Do you want to answer the cross-border one first? Sure.

So you're right. Our cross-border assessments were up 19% in the second quarter, which is about 3 ppt more than what you saw on the driver at 16% growth, and that was due to pricing, which was partially offset by mix. And you'd see that pricing continue for a few quarters going forward. So nothing more really on that, Darren.

So on transaction growth and GDP growth and the like, there are two broad pictures. One, of course, macro spending environment by consumers and in the B2B business is still good. Is it moderated towards compared to the prior year? Yes, but it's still relatively healthy. There are pockets of concern on macro spending. I think China is something that everybody has now begun to talk about, which is a challenge, and it's stressed. Mexico is slower. But there are other markets that are doing better. So, you know, Brazil is doing better. The U.S. is holding strong. The U.K. is holding up. Parts of northern Europe are doing fine. You know, India is doing okay, and Japan and Australia are doing okay. So the market is doing okay. That's the macro trend. Are we growing share? Absolutely. And we've been growing share consistently for a while across product categories. But growing share, you know, this business doesn't change share growth from, you don't grow share by 300 basis points in a quarter. You grow share by incrementalism mostly. Even if you win big deals in one country, the combination of that country contributing to the total world spend is still a smaller number. And so share grows. and share gives you a consistent tailwind, but it's first the macro and second share growth. And third, remember, we're smaller than some of the other competitors in some of these overall numbers because of our position in different markets, and that tends to make the percentage number look better. It's a combination of all three. I believe it's a little bit of all three going on. So you should take that into account.

Randy, I think we have time for one last question.

Your last question comes from the line of Craig Moore with Autonomous Research.

Hi, good morning. Thanks. Considering my peers have circled the wagons on all the enormous positives, I thought I'd ask on some of the few controversial items. First, can you discuss the Australian proposal to completely eliminate interchange by year-end? And if you can, comment on the fact that the UK Supreme Court has agreed to hear the class action case against MasterCard. Thanks.

First of all, Craig, Tim Murphy is delighted to get a chance to speak on the UK Supreme Court. So let him go ahead with that.

Sure. Craig, thank you. So we feel very good about the decision of the Supreme Court to look at – to approve our appeal. We'll take that forward in the next couple of months. Just to context on that issue, this is one of the first major cases in the UK looking at their new collective action, their class action law. We think the appellate court set a too low a standard, and that would produce an outcome in the UK that was not intended under the law. So we think this is a great opportunity for the Supreme Court to come to a more balanced decision, and then we'll proceed on that basis. But we were very pleased with that approval.

And then the Australian proposal, it's not just Australia. Wherever you come to zero interchange or MDR in a country, I continue to believe that no economic incentive for increasing either acceptance or digitization of payments doesn't make sense to me. At the end of the day, if there is a value being derived by an entity, be it a consumer, be it a merchant, be it a bank, from doing something, and somebody else is providing the capability for that value to be derived. In this case, specifically, if merchants are deriving some value from digitized payments, be it ticket sizes, be it lower theft, be it better cash management, be it lower expenses in math, and collecting a series of studies around the world that demonstrate what digitization does for the merchant community in terms of benefits for them, then I believe that in some way, incenting the providers who enable that digitization, acquirers, processors, issuers, who take on risk, expense, and the capital allocation that is required to enable this, is a sensible business model. to going to zero just says, I'm not gonna do it, and you need to find a way to do it anyway. And I suspect that's not the smartest way to go about it, but you know what, at the end of the day, countries will make decisions. Our job is to help illustrate to them through research, through logic, and through experience in other markets, what we believe to be conducive regulatory systems. And then when they make that decision, our job is to work with them the best we can. That's been our approach for years. That's the approach we'll take in Australia as well. I consider Australia to be a very important market for our company. We are market leaders there in a number of categories. With the Westpac trip recently, we are definitely market leaders in more categories. And I consider our presence in Australia to be that of a responsible payments partner for the Australian government and the ecosystem. And I will keep trying my best to work with them.

Thank you very much.

Sure. A few closing thoughts. We continue to execute well against our strategy. We just had another strong quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are really pleased to further extend the reach of our real-time payment capabilities with the P27 VIN in the Nordics. And we look forward to working with all our new colleagues from our recent acquisitions. And with that, thank you for your continued support of the company. Thank you for joining us today.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.