In today’s Fanning the Flames episode, Bryan Derman, Russ Jones, and Chris Uriarte share their first-take analysis of last week’s proposed settlement of the long-running antitrust litigation between Visa/Mastercard and a group of merchants regarding Payment Card Interchange and Merchant Discounts. For context, this suit was originally filed in 2005 and there have been various attempts to strike a settlement, including one in 2024 that was opposed by many large merchants, and which was ultimately rejected by the judge in the case. The current proposal is similar to the one offered last year, but contains some interesting changes and enhancements that the group examines.

The discussion covers the basic parameters of the settlement proposal and then investigates some of the possible reactions by merchants, issuers, and networks were the settlement to be approved the by judge. A consistent theme throughout the dialog surrounds the complexity of the responses and real potential to engender confusion among consumer and merchants’ front-line staff.

Listeners with a keen interest in this topic should note that it will be covered in much greater detail in our upcoming Advanced Payments Workshop. That session will be taking place in downtown San Francisco on Thursday, Dec 4, immediately following a presentation our two-day Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp™, also being held in San Francisco on December 2-3. We hope to see you there.

 

 

 

Bryan Derman: Hi again, everyone. This is Bryan Derman, Managing Partner at Glenbrook, bringing you another of our Fanning the Flame sessions. Today we’re going to give you our hot take on last week’s announcement of a proposed settlement of the long running antitrust litigation going on between Visa and Mastercard and a group of merchants and o obviously the surrounds, payment card interchange and merchant discounts.

If this is a topic you’re interested in, it’s going to be covered in much greater detail in our upcoming Advanced Payments workshop. That session is happening in downtown San Francisco on Thursday, December 4th, and it will follow a session of our two day Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp, also in San Francisco, on December 2nd and 3rd.

Okay, so back to the settlements. For some quick context here, we are talking about a lawsuit that was originally filed in 2005, and there have been a variety of settlement attempts to put this lawsuit to bed since that time, including one that was filed last year that was ultimately opposed by many of the large merchants and ultimately the judge in that case rejected the settlement.

Well, Visa and Mastercard are back this year with a similar but somewhat expanded offer to the merchants that has attracted some attention. So we wanted to summarize that proposal for you and give you some of our quick initial thoughts on the implications of it if it were to actually be enacted.

So Russ, you’ve looked pretty closely at this thing. Can you give us the short course on what the networks are actually offering this time around?

Russ Jones: I’d be happy to, Bryan. I think the best way to look at it is sort of a three-legged stool here. There’s three different parts of the proposed settlement, and they do build on one another a little bit, so there’s sort of a logical way to go through them, which is sort of interesting.

The first leg is sort of a relaxation of the honor all cards rule, which has been around since day one in the Visa and Mastercard networks, and other international card networks as well. And that started to crumble in 2003 when another class action litigation separated credit cards from debit cards.

And now what the networks are proposing to permit through a rule change is to separate credit cards into three different categories and let merchants selectively pick and choose which ones they want to accept and which ones they want to not honor in credit card lingo. So the three different categories are, they’re called the standard consumer credit, premium consumer credit, and commercial.

And standard consumer credit represents vanilla credit cards that don’t have any reward features, sort of like a starter credit card, if you will, and entry level reward cards. Then premium consumer credit cards represent sort of the types of cards, credit cards that everyone’s familiar with, perhaps a co-brand card that they have with an airline or with Amazon or something like that. Those are premium consumer credit cards. They have super duper reward features. I sort of think of it that way. And then commercial cards are all sorts of corporate level cards, corporate purchasing fleet cards as well as small business credit cards, that’s all grouped into this commercial category.

So the networks are proposing to let merchants pick and choose which ones they want to accept. They’re, of course, holding firm not allowing any sort of discrimination within a category. You couldn’t accept a Chase premium consumer credit card, but not a Bank of America premium consumer credit card. You’d have to accept all, if you’re going to accept that category, it’d be all premium consumer credit card.

And of course, you could imagine this would be somewhat awkward in the actual usage scenario. So the networks are proposing to require new credit cards going forward and reissued credit cards going forward to carry product category branding on the face of the card. That’s not unlike what they do with debit cards, where if you’re holding this card, it’s going to say debit on the front. If this settlement, proposed settlement, is finalized, you would be holding your Amazon Prime credit card and it would say premium consumer credit card on the face of the card.

That would flag to the consumers what type of card that they’re using, start to introduce a little bit of a vocabulary about different tiers almost, if you want, of credit cards. Merchants would have to be more forthcoming. In today’s world, they can accept debit or credit and they universally accept both, right? The merchant side of this selective acceptance capability would be to disclose not just the brand, not just a Visa sticker on your front door, but you’d have to actually have to disclose which of the Visa categories you accept and which of the Mastercard categories you accept. And it gives networks, the networks reserve the right to negotiate with merchants and provide incentives to not do that, to stay with an honor all cards sort of approach. So that’s selective acceptance and it’s the introduction of categories into the mix.

The second leg of the stool is some interchange rate reductions and interchange rate caps above and beyond what we see in the marketplace today. We have interchange rate cap, on the majority of debit cards, but there’s no rate caps at all on credit cards in the US market. We see that in other countries around the world.

So what the proposed settlement is setting forth is that Visa and Mastercard would look at, on an annual basis, they would look at a weighted average interchange for all domestic credit cards issued by Visa, same thing issued by Mastercard, and at the portfolio level, they would keep that weighted industry average 10 basis points below what the average was on March 31st of this year, looking backwards over the previous 12 months.

So that is a modest reduction in interchange rates, but significantly, it would freeze that weighted average for five years. So the networks could still adjust things within their product portfolios and their interchange categories, but they’d have to keep the weighted average 10 basis points below what it was in March of this year and do that for five years. So that’s probably the more interesting aspect, is not so much the reduction as the freezing for five years.

It also proposes, the proposed settlement puts forth the idea of, on standard consumer credits, that’s one of the three credit categories, capping those cards at 1.25% interchange and doing that for eight years. That’s included in the weighted average interchange, but it’s called out distinctly different on that specific category.

An important point here is that these are for US domestic transactions. So this would be a Visa or Mastercard credit card issued in the US by a US issuer and acquired in the US by US acquirer at a merchant domiciled in the US. So it doesn’t apply, these same cards that might be categorically a premium consumer credit card, it would be interchange as we all know it on a cross-border transaction, which are of course the most lucrative the transactions in the card system.

So the third leg of the stool is a relaxation of the surcharging and discounting rules that have been in place. I guess they’ve been in place for quite a while. There was a significant relaxation, maybe 10 plus years ago, that permitted, under a really fine tuned set of specifics, surcharging on credit cards in the US. It was sort of at the credit card level. You couldn’t charge surcharge debit cards, but you could surcharge credit cards as long as all credit cards were treated the same. So what the networks are proposing now is to relax that and allow category and product specific surcharging at the merchant level.

Bryan Derman: So back to those three grades of credit cards that you explained, those could attract different surcharges within a merchant’s,

Russ Jones: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So that’s why I say these things kind of build on one another. If you get past the idea of product categories, then you get some product specific rate caps, and then you get some category specific rate caps, and you get category specific surcharging as well, as well as product specific surcharging.

So this gives a merchant the ability to establish different acceptance policies where they might give a customer a discount for using a specific form of payment. They might offer no surcharge for using a standard consumer credit card and apply a 3% surcharge to a premium consumer credit card. That’s just one scenario that, that you might see in the marketplace.

Again, there’s a lot of rules in surcharging around disclosure and not surprising the consumer and giving them choice. Those rules have not gone away, and if anything, they’re further amplified because the merchants would have to disclose by category what their policies are and do it in a conspicuous way that consumers could make a choice about using an alternative card product or using an alternative form of payment altogether.

The networks here in their proposed settlement reserve the right to, of course, tweak this and make a lot of changes over time depending upon what merchants do. There’s a lot of different ways this could play out in the marketplace. So they reserve the option to create new interchange categories, possibly based upon surcharging behavior.

So it could be that there’s one category of rates for merchants that surcharge, another category rates for merchants that do not, that’s just one example of what is possible, I suppose. And they reserve, just like on a selective acceptance, they reserve the right to negotiate with merchants to not surcharge by brand, not surcharge by category, not surcharge by specific products. The key thing that’s significant about this is that the requirement to treat all credit card products similar across brands would go away under this proposed settlement.

Bryan Derman: That feels like the big difference this around because a lot of this rings sort of familiar to the work we did last year on the proposed settlement. And then we all forgot about it when the judge blew it up. But I hear the echoes of that settlement here, but some of this different treatment of different classes of cards-

Russ Jones: Yeah. I think if I were to do a one paragraph summary here, it would be the introduction of, we typically think about brands having products. Now we’re thinking about brands having categories of products. You can do certain things with brands. You can do certain things with categories. You can do certain things with products. So that’s one difference.

We see a little bit of interchange freezing, if you will, a little bit of rate reduction. But the key thing is the freezing over time. And then we see a little bit more flexibility to treat, once again, brands, categories, and products differently from a surcharging point of view.

Bryan Derman: Interesting. So Chris, I know you’ve been talking to some merchants about their reactions here and they’re all still getting their heads around it, but what’s your sense of the knee jerk reaction here?

Chris Uriarte: So if you look purely at the kneejerk, I would say that the initial reaction from most merchants we’re talking to is not necessarily one that’s overwhelmingly positive. We’re not hearing merchants say, Wow, this is amazing. This is pretty incredible. I think there’s a couple things that sort of are driving this.

The first thing is, as you pointed out, Bryan, this is a very complex settlement, right? So if you look at the settlement document itself and you just listened to Russ talk for about 10 minutes on this. It took Russ and the team a lot of time just to distill down this very, very thick settlement into a 10 minute overview on it, right?

Russ Jones: Chris has 160 pages compressed into 10 minutes.

Chris Uriarte: Exactly, it’s 160 pages. And there’s all types of perspectives here from sort of a pure payments world perspective, a legal perspective, and really the whole spectrum of issues that are contained within this document. So this is a very complex settlement. A lot of very complex issues.

And is addressing some themes that even before this settlement have had this very, very complex patchwork of rules. Things like steering, things like surcharging, and things along those lines. Not always very easy things for folks to understand to begin with, so layering the complexity and the settlement on top of this just makes the waters maybe a little bit more murky on these issues.

But nonetheless, I think the general sentiment is that any merchant settlement, any settlement that’s in favor of the merchant is a good thing. But I think the initial impression we’re getting from merchants is that this necessarily is not going to move the needle in regard to total cost of payments fairly significantly. As Russ had said, obviously we have some reductions that will be implemented and, most importantly, will stay for a period of time, at least for five years.

But merchants, anytime you talk about reduction in interchange, or a slight reduction in interchange as being proposed here, your merchants are always very quick to bring up the increasing total cost of payments. And one of the key things that’s contributing to that is non interchange fees, in particular scheme fees, assessment fees that are assessed by the card networks themselves. And those have continued to increase year over year.

So merchants are saying, Hey, it’s great. Perhaps you’re going to bring my blended interchange down 10 basis points, 15 basis points, whatever it’s going to be. But at the end of the day, my total cost of acceptance is not really going down. So that is a legitimate point.

Bryan Derman: Just do a little quick math on it. If it’s the 10 basis points that’s called out in the settlement document, that’s something like 4 or 5% of the average cost of acceptance. That’s not a dramatic reduction. It’s a reduction in a rate that has tended to go up in recent years.

Russ Jones: It’s a reduction that offsets last year’s increase.

Chris Uriarte: Right. That’s essentially what happens. And we didn’t get very, very deep into how that savings is calculated, but what’s being proposed is essentially a fairly complex weighted average calculation across the portfolio of cards. So, it is possible that there are certain card types, or certain products that will see an increase in interchange from some issuers.

And depending on your card mix as a merchant, that might not be a great thing when you look at your overall total cost of acceptance.

Bryan Derman: It’s going to have a lot to do with any given merchant’s portfolio profile. If you’re a merchant who attracts a lot of standard and standard reward cards, I like your chances of saving money better than if you’re someone who attracts a lot of premium card holders. It, it may be harder to realize that blended savings-

Chris Uriarte: Yep.

Bryan Derman: -at your Michelin star restaurant.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, agree with that.

Russ Jones: I think this calls for some research, Bryan, at a Michelin star restaurant. We might be forced to have dinner just to find out how the card is handled.

Bryan Derman: I don’t have any of those premium cards, so I’ll work the low end while you work the high end.

Russ Jones: I’m personally a debit card man.

Bryan Derman: All right. No wonder all the merchants like you.

Chris Uriarte: I think the other thing that we keep hearing from merchants is as they’re initially trying to digest this, trying to figure out what the practical aspects of this really mean when you start looking at things like selective acceptance. So when you really think about implementing this at the point of sale, whether that be face-to-face or whether that be online, what you’re really talking about is a scenario where you have to ask the consumer to present a payment card. Then you have to make an assessment as to whether you’re going to accept that card or not.

Or perhaps in the case of selective surcharging, make an assessment as to whether you’re going to surcharge based on that card category, and then perhaps go back to the consumer and either ask the consumer to present the lower cost card if you decide you’re going to discriminate against these more premium cards. Or represent something back to the consumer that maybe has a higher total at the bottom. After you first presented a total that had tax and everything included, now you’re going to go back and based on that card type, you might add an additional surcharge on top of that.

Bryan Derman: Yeah, it’s like, like tipping or something.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of weird, right? So the consumer experience could definitely vary here. And Bryan, I think as you said yesterday when we were talking about this, is perhaps e-commerce merchants have a leg up here. Because if you have a scenario where a consumer has multiple cards on file, then perhaps based on the card on file, you can initially just calculate what all those fees are and that’s included in the total. And should they go and they choose a different card that’s on file, it would recalculate that and be a little bit more seamless. So perhaps in the e-commerce world this is a little bit more seamless scenario, but in a face-to-face world, perhaps it introduces a little bit more friction at the till.

Bryan Derman: Yeah, at least in a checkout scenario, I have a chance to show you what might happen before I actually charge it to you as opposed to tapping a card at the till and seeing what the lottery turns up for you.

Russ Jones: And I oftentimes look at the global payments industry through my sample size of one, that happens to be my spouse. I can hear her now coming home and saying, My card’s broken.

Chris Uriarte: Right.

Bryan Derman: Yeah. You’re suggesting the scenario that worries me the most, Russ. Like, are we going to go somewhere and tap a Visa or a Mastercard and have the merchants say, No, I don’t take that one. Like, what do you mean by that? Are they actually going to turn away a card holder? Which they do. A merchant occasionally says, I don’t take Amex.

Russ Jones: It could be phrased as your card’s been declined. Because they are declining your card. The issuer’s not declining it. The merchant’s declining it.

Chris Uriarte: I think you guys are raising all sorts of really important practical issues about this experience. How is it presented to the consumer upfront? When the consumer does actually provide the payment card, how is that messaged back to them?

And I just think of this absolutely ridiculous experience of being in a busy coffee shop at seven in the morning, particularly in New York City where somebody presents their premium rewards card. It says, Sorry, we don’t accept this card. It’s too expensive. And then somebody starts digging through their wallet or their virtual wallet, their Apple wallet, looking for something that will be accepted.

And somehow that needs to be explained to the consumer. Somehow the signage hopefully is right. Somehow the barista maybe needs to be educated on this scenario and everybody’s sitting behind them wondering what the heck is going on. They just want to order their coffee. That sounds like a terrible experience.

Bryan Derman: All these people who were hired in order to pull a really great espresso, they’re now going to have to attend the Glenbrook Boot Camp so can explain the merchant’s acceptance, the cafe’s acceptance policy.

Russ Jones: I can see an online course now, a self-paced course, on the card product category fundamentals.

Chris Uriarte: Exactly. I’ll also say that I think the view of all this varies greatly depending on how sophisticated a merchant you are, right? So if you’re an, what I’ll just consider to be a non-sophisticated merchant who doesn’t do anything in regards to surcharging, steering, and you’ve never historically done anything in these areas, then nothing’s going to change for you. You’re perhaps just going to accept your savings, whatever they may or may not be over the course of time. And that’s what it is. You’re just going to go about your day.

I think the more sophisticated enterprise merchants are, as we’ve talked about earlier, really just digesting this and just starting to think about how they can get creative with this. So I’m sure many of them will get creative with some of this. This will be a call to action for some of them to take advantage of some of these new rules.

And the other merchant category that we often don’t talk about a lot because we’re dealing with medium size, larger, and enterprise merchants, is the whole mix of small merchants who are just paying blended rates for cost. So they’re paying 2.6% plus 10 cents, 2.9% plus 10 cents, something like that. At the end of the day, this does not impact them at all from a cost perspective. They’re still going to be paying 2.9% plus 10 cents.

Bryan Derman: That’s a great point that we’ve been making since the early days of Durbin, is that there’s a whole class of mainly smaller merchants who may not even feel the impact of interchange reductions. Or it may take a long time for those to work through the system. Because as you said, they pay a simplified, blended sort of rate that is not directly tied to the interchange and their PSPs are absorbing that variability and interchange.

Chris Uriarte: Now could I imagine a future where somebody like a Square or a Toast or somebody like that starts building in features that take advantage some of these rules. So for example, if it is a premium card, surcharge the premium card, but don’t surcharge some of the others. Perhaps you’ll see a future where the smaller merchants will take advantage of their platforms, their POS systems’ functionality to perhaps see some gains from this. But I think we’re a while away from that.

Bryan Derman: That whole approach, I think, makes some sense to me, rather than being in the very awkward position of trying to explain that our store doesn’t accept a particular flavor of Mastercard or particular flavor of Visa. Let the POS talk to the consumer about maybe the terms and the pricing under which a certain card would be accepted. So bring in the surcharging capabilities as part of it.

Your mind really wanders to the different kind of things you could see here. As you think about merchants who’ve been more sophisticated about this, my mind goes to the gas station, right? There’s a cash price and a credit price, and I’m never quite sure what the debit price is. But now you can imagine there’s a cash price, a debit price, a standard credit price. Like how many placards are going to have to sit on top of each pump to describe what price per gallon you might be charged here?

Chris Uriarte: Exactly.

Bryan Derman: Or, you tap your card first anyway at the pump, and again, spin the wheel and see what the price per gallon comes up. If you insert a couple of different cards until you get the answer you wanted. I don’t know.

The other thing looming over all of this, by the way, is whether or not the judge will accept this settlement. Last time around she had something like this on her desk, got a lot of pushback from some of the big merchants, from some of the trade groups on the merchant side were pretty vociferous in their opposition.

And the judge ultimately said there wasn’t, essentially, there wasn’t enough there for the merchants to make the settlement worthwhile, even though some class of merchants had theoretically agreed to it. It’s pretty hard to get merchant consensus on any of these things because they’re such a diverse group and the impact any proposed settlement are going to be pretty different from one type of merchant to another.

Russ Jones: I think it’s a truism, you could say that any industry trade group that represents merchants thinks this settlement is lacking. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the National Retail Federation and their constituents or the convenience store trade groups and their constituents. They’re all sort of not excited about it. And we just saw, was it earlier this week that Dick Durbin came out against this?

Bryan Derman: I think that’s right. Although I guess he’s retiring. He is retiring. That’s right. In the meantime, he can still be against it.

And again, this is a legal judgment. Doesn’t require an act of Congress, fortunately, to go through it, but obviously Senator Durbin is viewed as influential in these circles. I’m sure the judge read about that and gave it some thought,

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, I think it’s a very valid question as to whether the judge is going to accept this. It’s been a year and a half or so since the last one was presented, or maybe a year since it was struck down, and there’s not a huge amount of change here. We’ve talked about the impact on pricing and in fees is not really game changing, I would say, right? It’s not like coming into a European market and saying, tomorrow credit interchange is 30 basis points and debit interchange is 20 basis points. We’re not talking about anything like that. So it’ll be interesting to see what the judge says.

And also we want to stress to folks, I think, as we mentioned briefly earlier, is that it’s going to take time to get this approved and also implemented. So we think probably, best case scenario, if the judge does approve it, you wouldn’t see any of this being implemented until most likely 2027 is probably the reality here. So that means going back to your opening statement, Bryan, we’d be about 22 years after the initial lawsuit was settled on this.

Bryan Derman: You know, there are people joining the payments industry today who were not alive when this lawsuit was filed.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. Exactly.

Russ Jones: was wondering what would the proposed settlement look like if the interchange rate was rolled back 22 years?

Bryan Derman: Right.

Chris Uriarte: Right, exactly.

Bryan Derman: I’m hoping I’ll still be alive when we get an approved settlement of this thing. But I think a few things are becoming clearer as we go through these rounds of settlements. We do see merchants gradually gaining some new rights here, right? As Russ said, this is a little bit of a next wave of the breakup in the honor all cards rule and a loosening of surcharging rights.

So it does feel like the networks are gradually accepting a more granular treatment of their cards, that they have introduced a lot of new products and along with a lot of new interchange categories over the past decade.

Russ Jones: That’s sort of, maybe the arc of the story is that. And one of the rules that people who major in marketing learn is that all market segment, what starts off as automobiles, segments into automobiles and trucks, segments into big cars, little cars, fast cars, sports, utility vehicles. And this kind of is tracking that. We’re starting to see what used to be one product, one category, segment into multiple categories, each one with their different fit in the market, their different economics.

And one of the big unknowns, there’s a ton of unknowns here, I shouldn’t say one, there’s a ton of unknowns here. But one of the things that’s really makes you wonder about is the demographics between these categories. How would you categorize the premium consumer credit card holders versus the standard consumer credit card holders?

My gut tells me you’d see a big geographical spread. That’d be super interesting. A merchant in Omaha might have a completely different take on the market from what they experience than Chris’s coffee shop in New York.

Bryan Derman: Could be. I think the one big factor to watch out for here is that this is sort of hand to hand combat between the pros in the industry, right? The networks, the merchants, the issuers, the PSPs, these are all the sophisticated payments players.

The innocent bystander in this little street battle is the card holder, right? How do you do something constructive for the professional stakeholders in the industry with without totally losing the cardholder and making it incomprehensible to know what’s going on at the point of sale.

Russ Jones: The power of the honor roll cards rule, you could say that built the industry. From a simplification, it took off the table all complexity. It was just like you see the decal on the door, you know that your card is accepted.

Bryan Derman: I don’t know if anybody even worries about the decal anymore, right?

Russ Jones: I’m always looking for that decal, Bryan.

Bryan Derman: Unless there’s a sign that says cash only, I’m going assume credit cards are accepted and I’m going to tap my card and expect it to work. And heretofore, it always has. But we’ll see what happens here.

Chris Uriarte: Well, Brian, you talked about making this so complex that the consumer can’t understand it, that the challenge we’re having now is people in the payments industry and payments operations that have been in this industry for 20 years are just increasingly having more and more challenges at really understanding what is contributing to their payments costs. We work with merchants all the time, and these are very, very smart people that come to us asking for help, and even we have a lot of challenges sometimes trying to decipher what is contributing to the costs on a particular transaction, much less a billion transactions a year, right? So this continues to be challenging for folks that are really in the trenches every day.

Bryan Derman: Yeah, seriously true. I expect we’ll get dragged into some of these exercises with some of our clients, but it’s going to be a challenge to model out some of the strategies we’ve been kicking around here and what would happen if we didn’t accept that or put a surcharge of X on those.

Russ Jones: One of the things I did not mention in my short overview of what the proposed settlement rule changes were was, there’s a key part of it is merchant education with the networks rolling out a undescribed but somewhat serious educational program. And the way I read the settlement terms, it was to help merchants understand the benefits of selective acceptance and surcharging. Which is kind of startling on the surface because you would think that these are things they’re conceding as opposed to advocating,

Bryan Derman: Interesting and just such differential impacts across different kinds of merchants and what they might do with this.

The merchants are the other folks here that are not truly in the payments business. Some of the largest ones have the sophistication of somebody who’s in the payments business. But for the most part, payments acceptance is a function of a business whose main focus is something else. They’re trying to be a retailer or they’re trying to run a hospital or they run a cable company or whatever it might be. And so the complexity here around a function can be a little bit hard to grasp, particularly as you talk about smaller merchants who are going to need help figuring out how to play this.

Well, needless to say, this is an issue we will be watching, waiting anxiously to hear what the judge thinks about it, monitoring the commentary in the industry publications as we go. So I imagine, we’ll be back to talk about it some more.

Guys, any other concluding thoughts as we wrap up for the moment?

Chris Uriarte: No, other than obviously we have to keep a close eye on this. It might be like the first settlement where we might come back in six months to this and not actually have a lot to talk about because nothing’s happened. But who knows? We might be surprised.

Russ Jones: The other thing, to circle back to where we started, we’re going to be looking at this and other developments in the payments industry in December in our Advanced Payments workshop. And specifically in the card system, we’ll be looking at this settlement in more detail and playing out some different scenarios. And we’ll also be looking at configurable cards that take on different personalities depending upon where they’re being used and consumer preferences.

And we’re going to be spending a ton of time looking at stablecoins, hint, hint, maybe we don’t need cards. Also agentic commerce. So I’d encourage anyone that’s interested in what’s happening on the leading edge of the industry to sign up and join us in San Francisco.

Bryan Derman: Come by, learn a little bit about payments. Get some holiday shopping done in downtown San Francisco. It could be a good time in the first week of December for those who can join us.

Russ Jones: Did I mention the networking reception?

Bryan Derman: There you go. Guys, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to lay this out for us and we’ll look forward to talking about it again as we learn some more.

And thanks to everybody for listening in. We appreciate you as an audience and wish everyone a great holiday season and look forward to continuing to communicate with you in the new year. Take care everybody.