Jeffrey S. Sloan
Analyst · CLSA
I think, Craig, fundamentally, our portfolio really across Asia is heavily weighted toward the travel industry and the high-end retail shopping. In some cases electronics, but also just high-end retail shopping itself. And that's really the portfolio which we started with HSBC, and that's how we focused our merchants since then when you think of the markets we're in with the Maldives, Hong Kong, et cetera, you can imagine the level of travel. So with that, what we've seen is we saw a drop in average tickets in the summer, which generally indicates less spending. We may see the same number of transactions we saw the quarter before, but less spending overall. And, of course, we take a percentage of that, and that then harms the actual performance of the business. I mean at the same time, we've annualized some products as well. And including we now have DCC fully rolled out across the region, as well as our installment payment plan fully rolled out across the region, so some of the things that fueled a little bit more growth have annualized now. Really still brings you back to the core question of we're going to ride more secular adoption over time there. But for the moment, we're being harmed by being so travel again and high-end retail focused, but that's the place where we're seeing some pain. And this is true really across many of the regions there, whether you're talking about Hong Kong or all the way to Brunei, and again as I mentioned, the Maldives, et cetera. So I think we're not a dead-on comparison necessarily to the networks in those regions as they're driving more generalized secular adoption and we're focused in different part of the market. Now we have a number of initiatives in place to actually drive into other parts of those markets, more penetration. The same things we talked about last quarter that we thought would drive improved performance in Q4 actually still hold true. We are driving additional product launches, including new flavors of installment payment plan processing that we think will drive volumes deeper into the bank customer base as they shop, and general retailers around the various markets rather than just the high-end retailers. And then also, we've signed a number of new referral partners this year. They all do come live and are continuing to come live. Unfortunately, those improvements aren't quite enough to offset the overall volume softness we're seeing in general on the market.