Visa Inc. (V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Guys, thank you again for joining us. Again, I'm Darrin Peller, covering FinTech and payments at Wolfe Research. Joining us for Day 2 of the Wolfe FinTech Forum, we're really happy to have Visa, which is our top pick. As many of you guys know, it's been our top pick now for some time. With us, we have the CFO, Vasant Prabhu with us. We've had many, many times with us through the years for meetings and he's always been great to have. So first of all, thanks for joining us, Vasant.

Thank you for having us.

Before we jump in, I guess, on any of the visa specific trends and details you're seeing, it can't hurt to just start with what you're seeing in the market, given all the banking volatility and the closures of some pretty important banks last few days. So if you could start off with a sense of what you're seeing? Has the Visa network been able to operate fluidly? Is there anything -- any friction happening or any problems?

Yes. I think where the -- speaking from the standpoint of the payments network, things have been completely normal. Debit and credit credentials have been usable without any disruptions whatsoever. They're settling every night. So really no impact whatsoever. And...

Even over the weekend and over it was -- I mean it settles usually on a Sunday, right?

Yes. In fact, there's been absolutely no...

No friction?

No friction whatsoever.

Good. Good. Well, I guess that's good. I mean, frankly, as a reminder, Visa is there to step in if there were a problem, that's part of the your -- of the value proposition, right?

Yes. I mean we do have the backstop. And we always keep large amounts of cash and the cash has always been -- there was never ever any concerns on that front.

Right. Let's just take it a step back then. I mean it is a quick review. You guys put out a lot of data, so overall volume transaction levels from your most recent update through -- I think it was through January, like most recently.

Through February.

Through February, I'm sorry. We've seen resilience obviously, throughout the data. In fact, I think February came in better than a lot of people expected. And it's been pretty notable around consumer spending, especially cross-border trends, e-comm as well. I mean the resilience of e-comm has been pretty interesting and making folks think it's probably structural and here to stay. I mean, maybe just take a step back and remind us of some of the trends you're seeing.

Sure. Yes, I think as you said, if you shut yourself on -- I'd like to say if you shut yourself up in the room and all you did was look at our numbers, which is really what we try to do, we try not to be influenced by the opinions you hear people express starting all the way back to January of 2022, the business has been remarkably stable, right? It's been 43% to 45%, 46% ahead of 2019, almost on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis. And as you saw in February, once again, we had double-digit growth in the U.S. E-commerce growing strongly, card-present growing strongly, debit growing strongly. Almost everything was at or about double digits or close to. Cross-border, it's hard always to predict how cross-border is going to recover. It did recover at roughly the pace we had expected in our first fiscal quarter, which was the last calendar quarter. And then you've seen the recovery continue in the February numbers. I think we got to an index of about 131 on travel, which, by the way, now is a 4-year comparison. So you have to make some adjustments. But even if you look at it on a 3-year basis, which is still comparable to 2020 because COVID really started hitting in March. Now the comparability with '20 will end. It was still a nice recovery. And then cross-border e-commerce, as you saw, was the 180 index, which was very, very strong. So bottom line, I mean, really no change in trend to the end of -- through the end of February. Consumers are changing what they're doing within all that, as you know, going from products to services and more travel and entertainment and so on, and they're adjusting to inflation. But the aggregate level of spend, which is really what we see has been amazingly stable.

On that note, I mean, the behavior of the consumer, you haven't seen much shift in terms of -- I mean you've seen, again, more spending on travel, more on services. That's been the case now though, for...

Absolutely. And it continues, right? And we get this question a lot, and if you dig into the numbers, what you find is very intuitive. What -- it's intuitive in the sense that people sat at home in '21 and bought a lot of stuff. Now they've bought a lot of stuff, a lot of home improvement, things, lots of clothes, et cetera. Now they're spending their money on other things that they couldn't do in '21 and early parts of '22. So what's driving the business is travel is very robust still. Entertainment is also extremely robust. Restaurants have recovered quite well. Services, in general, are doing well. But that doesn't mean products are doing badly. If you just look at the -- we've been sane through this whole thing because we focused on 2019 as the benchmark. So it allowed -- prevented us from becoming, I say, manic-depressive, right? Like somehow we were geniuses in '21 and now we are not. Because the goods business, if you compare it to '19 is doing just fine. It's doing as well as it would have done had COVID not existed. The index to '19 is not bad at all. It's just that there was a big jump in '21. And compared to '21, it doesn't look so great. So if you were planning your business like '21 was the future, you're in trouble. But if you're looking at '19, you'd say this is fine. I would take these numbers. And travel hasn't fully recovered yet to where it would have been pre-COVID. Even entertainment is now -- restaurants are mostly back. So all in all, consumers have just adjusted and they're adjusting to inflation. They're shifting some behaviors, but they're holding their aggregate spending.

In terms of behavior, another thing we've seen is obviously Card-Not-Present, staying at a higher percentage of the mix than it was pre-COVID, right? You jumped a lot during COVID, but it stayed at that level even as folks are going back to brick-and-mortar stores. So is that something structural in your view?

I totally think it's structural. I mean, think about your own habits, right? I mean, going into the pandemic, there were many fewer people buying groceries online. I think there's more people now buying groceries online as a habit, and that's stuck. Going into the pandemic, there were fewer people doing restaurant buying online. That's become also a habit. So there's a variety of behaviors that have become -- people just got more comfortable doing things online. And those behaviors are definitely sticking. Now there's also -- the back-to-work thing is now different. Not everybody -- very few companies are back to work 5 days a week. So some of the card-present stuff may not come back in the long run. I mean there's some research that says that fuel purchases are being impacted by the fact that commuting has structurally gone down for the time being. Will it come back? I don't know. So behaviors have changed.

Yes. When we think about the economic -- the economic impact to your model of the behavioral changes, for example, is Card-Not-Present generating better yields, is it -- does it matter? Or is it more or less a loss?

No, Card-Not-Present is very good for us, right? Because we've said before many times that our share of a Card-Not-Present transaction is higher than it is of a card-present transaction. And yields wise, they're roughly similar. It have always been for us. But Card-Not-Present is, in fact -- I mean, we are the enablers of digital commerce. So Card-Not-Present is inherently a better thing for us because we do a better job than other forms of payment when you're doing e-commerce.

And there's more services attached to it.

There's more services, fraud, for example, is far more important in the e-commerce space, and we're very good at that. Reliability is very, very important. We're very good at that. So all the things we do well and dispute resolution is very important online. And so it helps.

How about travel? You were at 132% in '19 levels in terms of ex-Intra-Europe cross-border travel, around that range recently. And I mean are you seeing any impact from some of the reopening we're still seeing in Asia and China specifically yet or what's the progress been like?

Yes, absolutely. I mean we said that travel -- cross-border travel was an element of the recovery this year, that there was still more recovery left in cross-border travel, and we're seeing that. So if you look at it, Asia was a laggard and Asia has been recovering very nicely, and I would expect by the end of the -- this quarter, Asia may be back to 2019 levels. But the relevant fact is it's only back to 2019 levels, so there's still more to go. The other one that was a laggard was inbound to the U.S. And that's picking up but slowly. I would hope that by the end of this quarter, that would also be back to 2019 levels. On the other hand, inbound to Europe has been booming, beneficiary of the strong dollar. Inbound to Latin America has been booming, mostly because Latin America stayed open through most of the pandemic. Travel out of Asia is going to be a big driver of growth for a while and into Asia, too. As far as China goes, I think we told you to be cautious about how fast it would recover, and we've been right so far. I think what people don't recognize is that there was a massive reduction in airline capacity through COVID going in and out of China. And it's coming back only slowly. You have to get landing slots. So outbound Chinese travel to the U.S. and Europe will be slow. There are some countries that have really made it easy for Chinese travelers like Thailand. You can get a visa on the ground there. You don't have to get it ahead of time. There's more flight capacity that's come back faster. And so the beneficiaries right now are going to be more within Asia probably for the time being, maybe to the Middle East. Over time, it will build to the U.S. and Europe. There's a lot of internal Chinese travel also going on. I mean initially, it's easier to travel within China because the airline capacity has come back faster. So there were initially some testing requirements. I think most of those are gone now. So I think we'll start to see that more significantly as we get into the latter part of this year. But as we said, we need the cross-border business to recover and the China component is a big part of that.

Yes. I mean I think as a reminder, you talked about that -- well, the way we understood it, it was probably in the high single-digit percentage of ex-intra-Europe business pre-COVID. Is that about right in terms of cross-border business?

Yes, I mean we don't really want to get into all that other than to say that if the cross-border business is going to recover to pre-COVID levels, recovery in Asia and recovery from China is an important component of it. And that's the next leg of the recovery. Asia is just getting to 100%. And there's no reason why it won't get back to where it used to be before. And frankly, the cross-border business, if rates for hotels and airlines stay where they are because transactions are lagging even the volumes you see, right? So there's more recovery to come in transactions and actual trips. So you could see us go past the pre-COVID trend line at some point because rates are higher, but will they stick at higher levels? We'll have to wait and see.

I mean to your point, even the pre-COVID trend line, if I remember correctly, was cross-border tended to grow at around 10% -- 9%, 10% per year, right?

Yes. Travel was growing a little slower than that. E-commerce is growing faster. So yes, it was in that range.

But that would still extrapolate CAGR-wise to over 140% now if nothing ever happened with the pandemic.

Yes, there's more to come. And another component that's been very healthy is cross-border e-commerce. I think another new behavior through the pandemic is the idea that if I'm buying online, I'm not that sensitive to where the product comes from. So cross-border e-commerce has really picked up. A lot of global suppliers have learned that cross-border e-commerce is a good source of business. So I expect cross-border e-commerce to be another component. Remember, 10 years ago, cross-border was mostly about travel. Today, cross-border is meaningfully also got e-commerce in it.

Shifting gears a little bit. Your growth rate has been very strong for many, many years, and you've become a much bigger company. Yet despite that, the mix you're getting from some of the new value-added services, I think it's 20% of your revenues now, and some of the new flows opportunities that you've invested in your business to allow for, we've estimated it could allow for maybe some acceleration structurally in the business over time despite a larger base. I mean what are your thoughts on that?

No, that's our view, too. So our core business is consumer payments, right? And I still believe there's a very strong runway there. There are still -- the pandemic has been wonderful for digitization of cash around the world. More people have digital credentials to pay. Infrastructures have gotten better. So I remain extremely confident that the consumer payments business has a very long runway and a very healthy growth. But then think of it as we have 2 more vectors of growth we've added on in the last 8 years. One is a vector that increases our volume because our network has become so much more capable of doing things, we've added a vast number of use cases in what we call our new flows business that have huge total available markets that we never used to serve before, right, cross-border remittances, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a source of volume growth on top of consumer payments that we never had before. And then the other vector of growth is value-added services. So think of it as if I get a transaction, the more value I can add to the transaction, the more yield I get on it. So we've got 2 new vectors of growth, one that drives volume over and above consumer payments, another that drives value over and above the transaction. And they are growing much faster than consumer payments today. You saw our growth has been 20% in the last few quarters. So yes, I mean, as they become a larger component of the mix and they grow faster than consumer payments, structurally the growth rate goes up.

Honing in a little bit more on value-added services. Again, the 20% of your revenue now that's gone up pretty quickly. Talk about the go-to-market on that. Talk about -- if you don't mind reminding the audience have what those are, right, the mix of them and why they're growing so well?

Yes, we have -- we categorize them into 4 categories. There are solutions we have for our issuers, in that would be issuer processing, for example, in that would be a variety of services that are related to Visa account update where you don't have to change your card number when you get a new card, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a range of services for issuers. There's a range of services for acquirers and merchants. CyberSource is one of them. We also have a dispute resolution service called Verifi. In the issuer category, we have FX services now through Currencycloud. That's a broad gauge set of solutions. So we have issuer solutions, acceptance solutions and then our risk services, which you're all familiar with. We've been doing that for a very long time, and we keep adding to that with businesses like CardinalCommerce, that does authentication. And then finally, we have our advisory business. So those are the 4 categories. We keep adding services. Over the last several years, we acquired CardinalCommerce, which was authentication. We acquired Verifi, which was dispute resolution in a broader set of capabilities that we can serve other networks to do dispute resolution. We have clearly tokenization as part of that. We acquired Currencycloud that allows us to do real-time FX and FX for a whole range of businesses beyond traditional financial institutions. And the way it gets sold is we have our relationships, and we have people who manage those relationships, they call them the generalist. But we also have increasingly specialized sales forces who sell these specific services, which are unique in their own way. And then we have delivery people who can help clients set themselves up. So it requires a rewiring of the whole business and that's a reflection of why the business is now organized the way it is. We now have a leader for value-added services. We have a leader for new flows. It reflects the 3 engines of growth that we see carrying Visa into the future.

And the margin structure of the value-added services business, I mean, some of them seem a little more hands-on than obviously a network. So can you help us understand that?

Well, if it's a transaction service like processing, issuer processing or CyberSource or even our risk services, they leverage a lot of our existing infrastructure, and they tend to be very high-margin businesses. Where the margins are lower would be in things like consulting, which is more people intensive. So the value-added services come with a wide range of margins. But anything we can layer on to a transaction is incremental revenue. And it's good margin. It's margin that in any other business, you would think is a great margin except that we have a really good margin in our core business. But many of these value-added services, especially the ones that are very transactions-based have very attractive margins, often very close to our traditional business.

Have you ever disclosed how many of your customers actually already use these value-added services?

Yes. I think we've given some statistics. I think more than half of our customers use more than 5. I mean we have many, many services, 5 is just a small a number of them. I think a 1/3 use more than 10. So there's a huge opportunity to deepen penetration of these services. There's a huge opportunity to have more clients buy these services. Some of these services started out mostly as U.S. businesses. There's an opportunity to grow them outside the U.S., which is what we're doing with CyberSource and CardinalCommerce and Currencycloud and there's a big global opportunity. So the thing about value-added services is it's early innings even though we've been doing this for a while, there's a much greater focus. We keep adding to the menu of services. We keep getting better at delivering them. We keep getting better at selling them. We keep getting better at helping our clients understand the value. So I think there's a very long runway ahead of us.

One of the areas that, I mean, correlate to services and new flows is really account-to-account or some of the pay by bank we're seeing. And so there's obviously concern around it, right? Also in terms of whether it's a disintermediation risk for Visa. If you can expand on that a little bit.

I think the opposite. It's the opposite. I know there's been a lot of focus on how is this going to come. If you look at the history of the last, whatever, 5, 7, 8 years, we've made more progress doing -- gaining use cases and volume that used to be on other networks, then other networks have made headway into consumer payments, right? And our approach has been that things like RTP and A2A are not competitors, they're partners, right? I mean you talked -- we've talked about our network of networks approach, which is I've given the analogy of like take a company like FedEx. It's a FedEx-branded service. You ship a package, it gets to the other end, you don't care how it gets there. They may use their own claims. They may use somebody else's plane. And that's the model, right? The model is it's a Visa-branded service. And we can do card-to-card, account-to-account, account-to-card, et cetera. It's our brand, it's our reliability, it's our security, right? We will do it. We've got dispute resolution. What rails it rides on shouldn't matter to you. And what this allows us to do is we now connect to, I think, 36 ACH networks through Visa Direct. I think there's a dozen RTP networks. I think 15 or so card networks. It just vastly expands the reach of our network. And as you know, the value of the network is a function of the nodes by being able -- and most of these are open to us because they are all open networks, they're not proprietary. We use them, and it's good for them, it's good for us and we partner with them. And...

I think what you're saying -- so look, there's obviously risk guys that you're going to end up seeing whether it's digital wallets or account-to-account like Zelle, right, take the place of what people are using the card networks for. However, what I think you're saying is that Visa Direct and your systems that allow for push and pull into the same, adds the net increase of all the flows coming in from things like P2P or...

Yes, I would say one last thing, which is a pipe by itself has no value, right? Just because there's a pipe doesn't mean it's going to have volume. You have to have a service. And what people don't recognize is that we're not just a pipe, right? We offer a service, and the service has several components to it. One is security, which is very, very important because this is money. So if it's a pipe with bad security, that's not a good thing. We offer dispute resolution which some of these pipes don't offer where if you make a mistake, you can get your money back, and it's done very well and very reliably. We run 6 9s availability, 6 9s, which means they're almost never done. In fact, if they're ever down, it's front page news, and we don't like being on the front page. So some of these don't offer that kind of reliability. So our goal is to have a service that is superior to what the other pipes can offer but also use the other pipes if we need to deliver our service. So people often get confused by the idea that if there's a pipe, oh my God, that must be competition. You have to look at what's the service and is the service competitive with what we offer.

Speaking of Visa Direct, as you're talking about it. I mean it had transaction growth. I think it was 36% in fiscal '22, $5.9 billion transactions at ex-Russia. But when thinking about that opportunity, I mean, what are you seeing the most progress, whether it's P2P or other areas?

Well, I think the thing about Visa Direct is it offers a set of things that almost nobody else offers, right? It's global in scope, which no RTP network or ACH network is. It's real time, which is not true with SWIFT and other alternatives. It's highly reliable. It's highly secure, and it's incredibly ubiquitous, right, in terms of the endpoints. So it has some incredible advantages it offers. And then it has our brand, don't underestimate the value of our brand because it implies a certain set of promises. The use cases are huge. Remittances is a massive, massive business that we've never played in. We have a very elegant, a very cost-effective solution. We're working with all the major players, both new ones and traditional ones who are in remittances. I think remittances is going to be a very, very big business. It's a massive total available market. And for lots of reasons, we never played in it. Now I think we have a much better mousetrap than alternatives. I'm very bullish on the revolutionizing of payroll. On-demand payroll, I think, could be a very, very big business in the long run. There's already a lot going on there. Disbursements, people get all kinds of disbursements from insurance companies, et cetera. We do that today. That's a big business. Marketplace payouts, whether it's Airbnb paying their host or Upwork paying a supplier, someone who does programming for you, we can deliver that. So the use cases are quite significant, and every one of them has a massive TAM. Think about Visa Direct is not a product, right? Visa Direct is a capability. And it has multiple verticals, each of which has huge markets. So this is just very, very early days for Visa Direct.

Visa Direct versus RTP. It's another topic that comes up a lot. I think it's supposed to be a similar price -- similarly-priced offering for real-time payments and similar in terms of what it can deliver. But Visa Direct probably has some differences that I think in your view, probably would have given a bit of an edge, maybe.

Not a doubt. I mean first of all, when it comes to being global, RTP isn't, right? So you're just not competing if you're RTP on a global basis. So anything that has to do with cross-border, I think Visa Direct is the only real-time solution around. And then if you get to domestic, we offer a service that is more secure, more reliable, allows you to dispute and get your money back that most RTP networks don't today. So we clearly offer a superior service, and we think that not only does that allow us to be more useful as a solution for people but also get a better yield on it.

And in terms of the international adoption of Visa Direct or versus the likes of OpEx or some other international, how is that going for Visa?

Well, the thing is when you have networks like PIX or UPI, it lifts all boats, right? So when the government gets involved and creates these networks, what the government does, as it has done in most of these places is really gets people to use digital payments. They all end up having a digital credential. They get used to making digital payments. Merchants start accepting digital payments. It vastly expands the universe of people who accept digital payments and make digital payments, and that lifts all boats. So it grows the whole market. They get a certain type of transaction. But when it comes to high-value transactions, you can't underestimate the value of our brand. The brand matters, the security matters. Some are fastest -- two of our fastest-growing markets in the last 5 years have been Brazil and India, and it's not a surprise. It's because of all the things that have happened because of these networks that has vastly expanded the usage of digital payments, and that helps us too. And we welcome them. We're partners with many of them. We're happy to work with all the governments because our goal is the same as theirs, which is to be more inclusive and get more people into the digital economy, to get more people to have bank accounts or have ways to pay that -- pull them into the financial economy. Our interests are very aligned and we do benefit a lot.

So just to put it in perspective, if we had to rank the areas that Visa Direct is really having the most success, whether it's P2P or it's payouts like insurance payouts or G2C.

Yes. Well, P2P is always the first use case, and it is the one that gives you the volumes. I would then put cross-border remittances as a close second. I'd add in disbursements and marketplace payouts. And at some point, the revolutionizing of payroll as the other use cases. But the number of use cases is very large. And we also have to be prioritized because every one of these is a very, very big market.

Let's shift gears a little bit in terms of investment, capital allocation. What are your priorities from a capital allocation standpoint?

Yes. Nothing's changed. We are fortunate to have a great business with great cash flow. Our priority is it would be a crime not to invest in this business because the returns are great and you never want us to underinvest. And it's a long-cycle business. That's what makes the business -- a difficult business for a lot of people is you have to be very patient. You have to invest for a long period of time because network businesses don't get created overnight. So you really have to be investing for revenues that you may not get for 4 or 5 years. I mean, we were investing in Visa Direct a long time ago. So investing in the core business, priority 1. If we need to buy things to expand our capabilities, clearly, that's important. We return cash to shareholders in the form of a dividend. It's a well-stated dividend policy, and the dividend grows nicely with our earnings. We return cash to shareholders, but we never borrow money to do that. We do it out of free cash flow. And nothing is going to change on that front.

And from an M&A perspective, just a little bit more detail on what kind of activity you'd be looking to do?

Yes. Look, I think what we've shown over the last several years is going back 7 or 8 years, we were not big acquirers, but we have been steadily been acquiring capabilities and they've all worked well. We've acquired CardinalCommerce. That has given us an authentication business, which has done very well. We acquired Fraedom, which gave us a business -- it's B2B expense management capability. We just acquired Currencycloud, which I think will vastly expand our FX capabilities we acquired Verifi, which allowed us to dispute resolution for a very broad set of clients. So I think we'll keep adding capabilities where it makes more sense to buy rather than build, but we also build a lot on our own. So I don't think our M&A game plan is going to change very much.

Still more of a tuck-in strategy than...

Yes. No, we've been adding capabilities like Earthport, we did a few years ago that gave us access to bank accounts. Tink gives us open banking capabilities in the market where it's most relevant, which is Europe. So that's the kind of thing you'll see us do more of.

And Vasant, what about on the regulatory front? It's obviously something that we can't ignore for Visa or Mastercard for years. And so...

No, regulation has always been part of our business from day 1. It will always be part of our business. And we always have to be good at explaining to regulators what our business is and how we can help them and engage with regulators all over the world, and that's what we've been doing.

There's been some questions over whether there's friction, I know between other networks that process transactions with Visa using their tokenization?

Yes. I mean we've been allowing people to -- I mean, there should not be any friction. I mean, tokenization is very good for everyone. It is drastically reducing fraud online. It will get rid of a lot of the fraud over time completely. So tokenization, everybody agrees is a great thing. We allow everybody, tokenize merchants are not inhibited on where they can route. We can -- we make our tokens. The PANs available tokenized to other networks. So -- and we've been doing it for a very long time. So there's nothing on our front that makes it hard for people to use tokenization on other networks.

Okay. Guys, I'm going to turn it to the audience in just 1 minute. So if you have any questions, now is your time. But last year, as CFO -- last fiscal year as CFO of Visa, Vasant. So when you think about what you're proud of, what you want to see from the company over the next several years as you pass the torch, maybe just leave us with that.

Sure. Look, I think Visa today is, in many ways, better positioned for growth than it was even 8 years ago. So 8 years ago, it had a great growth trajectory. And it proved itself, right, meaning we more than doubled our revenue. We've almost tripled our EPS, our stock price almost tripled. So we had a great run. But if you look at where we were 8 years ago versus today, it's a vastly different company, right? 8 years ago, we were a consumer payments business. Today, we are a consumer payments business with some extraordinary new growth engines in new flows and value-added services, which I think has vastly expanded the total available market. The other thing that I don't think people understand is the value of our network has gone up dramatically. 8 years ago, our network only did, you could say one thing and did it very well, right, which is to take money from your bank or your credit account and give it to a merchant, one-way flow. Consumers on one side, merchants on the other. Over the last several years now, we can move money both ways, which is what allowed Visa Direct to happen, and we can move money from one node to another node, which allowed us to do all these things, B2B G2C, et cetera. And not only that, we've completely changed how we think about things where 8 years ago, we just did everything on our network. Now we have a network of networks. And so the nodes available have been vastly expanded, right? So that's part one, a significantly more flexible network. Part 2 is we've taken a lot of the friction out of it in a big way. It is so much easier now to be part of our network, whether you're an acquirer or a merchant. I mean you used to have dedicated devices with landlines, all into smartphone at either end, you can tap. The friction has gone down, which increases the value of the network. And then another huge thing I would tell you is 8 years ago, all we did was deal with traditional financial institutions, issuing traditional financial institutions acquiring. And today, we deal with a vast array of partners, right? We've become very good at partnering with a whole range of new players. We're embedded in wallets, we're embedded in phones. We're working with a whole range of -- we have become the biggest enabler of fintech scaling, right? We are -- I like to think of as the biggest enabler of disruption in the financial services business because if you have a great idea, the way to scale it is to come to us. And it's a win-win proposition. You win and we win because that's all new volume to us. So if I look at Visa today versus -- and then we have the -- we still have the margins and the cash flow to invest in our business, and we've shown that we can do acquisitions to expand our capabilities. 8 years ago, we hadn't been doing much in terms of acquisitions. So I look at Visa today and I say, the opportunity set is far greater. The size of the available market is far greater and the value of the network, right, and what it can do is far greater than it was. So I'm actually more bullish about the future than I was even 8 years.

Great. Well, you've been great for the company and for shareholders. So...

Thank you.

Maybe we have time for 1 question.

Bit of a philosophical question for me. There's always been some pressure about putting your network and shutting down maybe certain countries in vertical. In the past, when I asked a question to Mike or Jennifer, the answer was we're never going to weaponize our network. Obviously, with Russia that changed, you had some problem with MindGeek as well. So kind of 2 questions. First, what are the criteria going forward about taking action against certain country or certain merchant or certain vertical? And second question, do you think that halters your growth trajectories in certain markets that might not be so keen of having an external agent meddling with their payment system favoring maybe their own system?

Yes, it sounds like there are 2 kinds of questions there. So as it relates to the issue of where do we draw the line on what we would do and not do, we've always said that we will follow the law, whatever the law is in the country we operate in, right? And laws can differ from country to country, we will follow the local law, and something may be legal in one country and not legal in another country, you sort of have to live by the laws of the place you operate in. We don't view ourselves as makers of laws. That's not our business. We are here -- look, we are just -- we're a humble enabler of payments. That's who we are. All we want to do is help people pay, that's it, right? I mean we just want to make sure that if people want to pay digitally, we can enable that. That's all we want to do. And so we will do that, and we'll follow the law. As it relates to what happened in Russia and its ramifications for the future, I mean, that was a unique situation. In the end, I mean, we weren't the only ones who did what we did. Almost every American business and probably almost every European business ended up doing what they had to do. I don't think you can draw a straight line from Russia to other countries. We engage with every other country. We know that nationalism is important. I mean every country has to take care of their own interest, right? We understand that. And our goal is to work with the country to make sure they understand that we will do what we have to do to make sure that they feel comfortable that we're there to serve the needs of their people. And whatever their requirements are, we will comply with them. And that's an active discussion going on everywhere in the world all the time.

Thanks, guys. Vasant, really appreciate having you again. It was great having you.

Thank you.