Martina Hund-Mejean - Mastercard, Inc.
Management
So, Dan, first of all, for the whole year, we gave a guidance that we would be at the high single digits on a currency neutral basis for operating expense growth, right, and that continues to be true. And that is excluding acquisitions, okay. So, steady-state company with the investments that we are making has high single digit for the whole year. That includes any of the FX charges. That includes any of the Masterpass cost on the A&M side, which quite frankly, quite a bit of the cost is being accelerated from the fourth quarter into the first three quarters of the year. So we have absolutely no change for that. In terms of driving growth, when you look at that high single-digit investment that we are making on the OpEx line, that is, when you look in the detail of it, is a number of things. One, it's obviously digital. We continue to invest in digital. Number two, so this is both on the technology side, that is on helping our customers to getting up and running; that is where the A&M is going up. So that is digital. Secondly, we're doing quite a bit of geographic expansion. You can look at what Ajay said about China. Of course, we're building the technology backbone there, so that is expense. In India, given the demonetization, we are investing quite a bit there. In Africa, there are a number of those things going on. So geographic expansion is another big bucket. The third bucket that drives growth, which we have been calling out in a number of quarters, is of course what we're doing in safety and security, right? So a number of the things we're actually doing and until very recently, from an organic investment point of view. Look at the Safety Net feature that we had shown to you a number of times; that was actually an organic investment that this company has been making. Recently, we've been adding a few inorganic acquisitions to it, but that is a very key investment area for us. And then last but not least, as we called out this quarter, we are continuing to invest in our advisors capability, which is really two things: One, what we are doing on the consulting side with our customers, which does pay back in spades because of better portfolio performance, additional things that our customers might be doing that really benefit our volume and transaction. But also it's what we're doing on the data analytics side that goes way beyond financial institutions. That is where we're helping a lot, the merchants, to be very successful with what they need to do to sell to consumers.