Welcome to Visa's Fiscal Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Mike Milotich, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Milotich, you may now begin.

Thank you, Jordan. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Visa's fiscal second quarter 2020 earnings call. Joining us today are Al Kelly, Visa's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Vasant Prabhu, Visa's Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of our Web site at www.investor.visa.com. A replay will be archived on our site for 30 days. A slide deck containing financial and statistical highlights has been posted to the IR Web site. Let me also remind you that this presentation includes forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially as a result of many factors. Additional information concerning those factors is available in our most recent reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K, which you can find on the SEC's Web site and the Investor Relations section of our Web site. For historical non-GAAP financial information disclosed in this call, the related GAAP measures and the reconciliation are available in today's earnings release. And one last note before we get started. Given the amount of content we have today we want to allow time for Q&A, and so we're likely to run over by a few minutes. And with that, let me turn the call over to Al.

Hey, Mike, thank you very much. And good afternoon everyone, and thanks for joining us today. First and foremost, I hope you and your families are well and safe. A year that looked quite promising after a solid first quarter has been substantially disrupted by COVID-19. While the business has been negatively impacted, in March and April, our focus has been doing the right things for our employees, our clients, and our communities around the world whose lives have been affected in unimaginable ways. We continue to manage our business for the long-term although we are pragmatic in understanding short-term circumstances. Through that end we are certainly being quite careful about our spending on our expense base, and we are pulling back on discretionary spending especially related to personnel, travel, professional services, and marketing. Throughout all of this we remain committed to investing in the future, in product development, in technology, our brand, and business development. You may recall that at our Investor Day we laid out a compelling case for Visa's growth as we look to be a single point of connection for money movement globally. And there are three primary levers to that growth, consumer payments, new flows, and value-added services. I want to be absolutely clear that nothing has changed about these opportunities in terms of the medium and long-term growth for the company. On our call today, I'm going to cover our results, our response to COVID-19, and some updates on the underlying business and long-term prospects for growth. To start, our second quarter results. Net revenues in fiscal second quarter were $5.9 billion, an increase of 7% or 8% in constant dollars. Although cross-border volumes were already weakening in February, driven by Asia, for the most part the business drivers were not meaningfully impacted by…

Thank you, Al, and good afternoon, everyone. This is an unprecedented time. And we know you all have many questions about the COVID-19 impact on our business. To provide you with up-to-date data in this fast-moving crisis, we will discuss trends occurring after the quarter ended more than we normally would. Also, while the absolute level of growth or decline is important, the second derivative of the rate of change in trend lines is equally important. To help you with all this, we've added a slide to our earnings presentation with weekly data for March and for April through the 28th. This slide provides additional details on U.S. payments volume growth, as well as process transaction and cross-border volume growth. Starting with U.S. payments volume, after strong growth in January and February, payments volumes dropped precipitously in the second-half of March, as lockdowns went into effect across the U.S. By the last week of March, payments volumes were declining 28%. Credit spending was harder hit than debit and declines have been more than 25% every week in April. On the other hand, debit was down in the mid-teen through the first two weeks of April and spiked into positive territory in both week three and week four as the first wave of economic impact payments were distributed. It is too early to tell if this uptrend in the second-half of April is the start of a recovery, a new plateau, or will fade in a couple of weeks. Through April 28, U.S. payments volumes are down 19%, debit is down 6%, and credit is down 31%. As may be expected, there is a drastic difference in thought present and card not present performance with card not present or ecommerce volume excluding travel up 18% in April and card present volume…

Thank you. Jordan, we're now ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning and I hope you guys are all staying well and healthy. Just a question now on the structural nature of travel, could you just talk about how you feel about cross-border travel and the structural impacts that might occur as a result, and when you expect it to rebound? Thanks.

Thanks, Sanjay. Hope you are well as well. Look, right now I think -- I don't know what percentage, but some huge percentage of countries are hunkered down, and that's largely driven by government mandates. I do think that over time people will -- obviously these lockouts will loosen up. And I think the first thing to come back will be domestic travel as people look at stretch their legs and move around a bit. I think cross-border travel will take a little bit longer to come back. I think we need some advances. And as Vasant made note of in his remarks, I think we're going to need some advances in terms of testing and therapeutics, and ultimately a vaccine will start to make everybody feel a lot more comfortable. So I think it's going to take some time and it's going to take -- but I think it will come back. I think it's possible that there could be some business travel that doesn't return at the same level given the fact that we're in an environment where people have been working from home for seven, eight, nine, 10 weeks depending upon the market, and realize that they can get done what they need to get done. So we'll have to see how that ultimately plays out. Offsetting that, Sanjay, is the reality that I think the cash displacement opportunity in the business as well as the explosion of ecommerce are going to be real structural opportunities that didn't really exist at the same level before COVID-19.

Thank you.

Next question, please.

Our next question comes from Moshe Orenbuch from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Great. So following up actually on that last question and answer, could you talk a little bit, Al, about the -- that evolution, if you will, of ecommerce and cash conversion. And related perhaps to the elements of the economics to your business of those types of transactions? And probably should have said at the outset, glad you are all healthy. Thanks for the extra data, and hope you can keep that up too.

Thanks, Moshe, appreciate it. Hope you and your family are well as well. First of all, there isn't a tremendous amount of difference in terms of the economics to Visa whether it's credit or debt, or card present or card not present. There just isn't that much of a difference. I think that's the main point. I think beyond that we're seeing people during these last couple of months start to buy things in the ecommerce environment that they would typically buy in store, whether that's furniture, electronics, in some cases apparel. And I think to the degree that they've had good experiences, that that's a really good thing. And remember, when you think about ecommerce the reality is that it's a very, very positive thing for us because cash isn't a competitor in that space. So the reality is that we get a lot higher share from those transactions that go to ecommerce than we get in the face-to-face world, and I think there are some permanent changes. Now, whether gaming stays up at the level of that as people are finding things to do while they're home, I suspect that'll come back down a bit, but I think, in general, ecommerce will explode coming out of this.

Yes, a couple of points -- data points to add to that. I mean you might have noticed that ecommerce -- cross-border ecommerce excluding travel is now trending at a faster growth rate than it was prior to the crisis, and a lot of that is what you might call retail spending. More than half of it falls into categories that are people buying goods and services on a cross-border ecommerce format. The other thing that perhaps could be permanent changes are there are categories now, for example, food and drug, where the propensity was more towards face-to-face transactions, that have had massive shifts to, obviously at this point for reasons where they have no alternative, to online buying. And some of these goods could be fairly permanent. And then beyond that, even face-to-face, there's certainly a growing tendency to not want to use cash, and also of course not even do -- just to tap your card. The aversion to cash could be persistent, which means that even in face-to-face transactions the penetration of digital forms of payment could be growing in a permanent and structural way faster then it might have prior to the crisis.

Great, thanks very much.

Our next question comes from Tien-Tsin Huang from JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks so much for all this data. Just on the client incentive side, forgive me if I missed it, but did you give us a little bit of an outlook there on how to second-half might look on client incentives with all the wins that as we have listed. I heard the majority is tied to volume growth, but any other detail would be great. And then just as a quick follow-up on Truist, can we assume the legacy non-Visa SunTrust cards will be flipped or would those be reissued at expiration, just wanted to clarify that. Thanks.

Tien-Tsin, thank you, and hope you're well. I'll take the second-half and let Vasant comment on client incentives. We're obviously thrilled with [technical difficulty] deal came out, and over time there's going to be some cards swept, but we're going to work very hard to Truist. Remember, they're building a new brand here. So the BB&T and SunTrust brands, they're looking to sunset those and get the Truist brand out there as soon as possible. So I think given that these cards are a ongoing manifestation of the brand that are shown every time they get pulled out of the wallet, I think they're going to want the move fairly quickly, but we're still working through the details as the deal just recently got done. Vasant, you want to comment on the client incentives?

Yes, Al. So on client incentives, I think you asked two questions. Our expectations in terms of client incentives as a percent of gross revenue, we gave you a range at the beginning of the year. I believe it was 22.5% to 23.5%. That range has not changed. So we still expect to be in that range, even as we've had, as we told you, a very, very high level of renewal activity as well as wins and so on, that Al went through. As far as how our incentives might respond to what's happening right now, the incentives are always meant to be linked to performance, and especially volume performance. So our incentives are pretty much linked to volume performance and should move with volumes. And that'll play out over the next few quarters. So hopefully that answers your two questions.

No, it does. I appreciate it, guys. Stay healthy.

Our next question comes from Bob Napoli from William Blair. Your line is now open.

Hi, thank you and good afternoon everybody. A follow-up I guess on just the growth of value-added services and what you're seeing in the growth rate of value-added services over the last several weeks. And then I guess in line with adding the value-added services, the acquisition of Plaid, is that still on track, and how is Plaid performing?

Hey, Bob, thank you, nice to hear your voice. First in terms of value-added services, these tend to be excellent revenue streams and quite resilient. And some of them are certainly transaction-dependant, and the volume could go down, but honestly in times like this the value goes up though to our clients. So those would include things like CyberSource or our risk products or debit issuing processing products. And then obviously we have value-added services that really are not really tied to volume, and they're also extraordinarily valuable in times like that. I referenced two of them in my remarks, both the criticality of data to our clients, because everybody is seeing the numbers go down and they want to make sure that they're not way out of whack with where everybody else is, and then obviously consulting services. It's also an exciting time for us to be able to introduce other new clients to some of our value-added services. So the crisis gives us an opportunity to have dialogue and make sure that our clients are using all the tools that they can from Visa. So we're going to continue to make sure that we stay in close contact with our clients throughout this, and where appropriate introduce them to value-added services' offerings that they may not be using. As it relates to Plaid, we're on track. As you know, we have to go through regulatory review, and we expect to have that done by the end of the year, and we remain as excited about Plaid as we did when we talked about it at Investor Day. In terms of how it's doing, we don't own them so I can't really comment on that at this time.

Thanks, Al. Thanks, Vasant, appreciate it.

Thanks, Bob.

Our next question comes from Lisa Ellis from MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.

Hi, good evening, and good to hear your voices. The government involvement in the digitization of payments has been something that you mange very carefully because it has its pluses and minuses. As you're going through this crisis how do you anticipate how the governments might act differently with respect to digital payments coming out of the crisis, meaning any new regulations you could foresee, new government-funded initiatives, positives or negatives for your business? Thanks.

Well, I think, Lisa, first of all, you're right on that I think that governments are just as interested in digitization as any other business at this point, and it helps with transparency, it helps them understand whether funds are going with more accuracy than they might get, they might get otherwise. Certainly, I think it's also possible that governments could on the other hand look at pricing in the marketplace. I continue to believe that pricing should be set by markets and not by governments. I think markets do a far better job of doing it than governments do, and I would say that specifically as it relates to Interchange, there's a tremendous amount of value delivered by our bank partners in terms of the credit, they extend to enable buying to the services they provide to the servicing they provide, to the fraud they provide, to the risk services they provide and rewards that they provide. So there's a tremendous amount of benefits that the economies of countries see and the individual citizens in those countries see. So and I would also say that any actions that would disrupt any type of recovery during a pandemic like this would be foolish and potentially very damaging.

Thank you. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citibank. Your line is open.

Thank you. Hi, Al. Hi, Vasant. Hope you're all healthy, and appreciate the incremental detail. I wanted to ask about this pricing in the current environment, but the ability to exercise price improvements to reflect value and other factors and the willingness to use it when merchants are not in great shape. So that and then the quick follow-up just on the clarification on one of the charts, when I look at U.S. payments volume growth versus process transactions growth in the operational performance metrics mid-April, they both look down 30%, but now one is down 10% and the other is down 20%. So there's a different pace of recovery. I was wondering if you could explain that.

I can take that question on transactions versus payments volumes. And Al, I'm sure will take the other one. I had it in my comments. So, I'd encourage you to go back and look at them, but just to repeat that, it is we think a temporary shift. Typically, as you know, transactions growth does better than volume growth because we are penetrating more deeply into smaller and smaller transactions. The reason it's different in the last two weeks of April, is what we have seen is that as some of these stimulus payments have come through, people are prioritizing pent-up demand in areas like automotive, like home improvement, and they're not spending it on lower ticket categories, like entertainment and restaurants. So what you're seeing is a mixed shift in how people are spending money to hire higher ticket items. As a result, PV has improved more than transaction labs. So that's what you're seeing, and that's probably not what the long-term trend is going to be, but it's what we're seeing right now.

Hey, Ashwin, just let me first add to Vasant's comments, think about a normal day, when people actually go to work and they're not working from home, you go and you get some coffee at a gas station or at a mass transportation shop, you pay for your transit, you pay for your breakfast, you pay for your lunch, all of those kinds of everyday low ticket transactions are not happening in this environment. So, in addition to what Vasant was saying, you could just, that's a huge driver of the change here and why we're seeing higher average ticket costs, but lower level of transactions. The other question you asked was about pricing. Look, we're in an unprecedented period, certainly not something I've witnessed in my life where the impact of this pandemic is truly global. Our focus right now is to make sure that we're bringing as much stability through the payments ecosystem as possible, which is why we get into our major co-release this month of April where we normally do, and I don't know that we've ever not done it before, but this is the times where it was called for, and I think we're going to certainly be very cognizant of the uniqueness of this time in terms of pricing. As like, I think most companies in most industries will be reevaluating their plans on all kinds of fronts, including the pricing lever and how much they pull it given this new reality.

Bye. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Darrin Peller from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Hi, thanks guys. I'm glad everybody's doing okay there. Look, I wanted to start off just if we, Al, if we had to sort of put all the pieces together a longer-term, and assume that some travel maybe wouldn't come back per se, we're not sure yet, but there are enough positive implications of what's happening around contactless incremental flows, more digital and maybe some of your services that you think can actually offset that. Is this, I mean, have you done the work to think about whether those can add up to maybe offset, but then just one quick follow-up would be on capital allocation. I guess I maybe I missed it, but I didn't hear anything about changing plans around buybacks or anything along those lines. Can you just give us some update on that? Thanks guys.

So, I'll tackle the first question, and let Vasant tackle the question on capital allocation and buybacks. So Darrin, I again, I think that there are -- and we're still talking about it there might be others, but I think the big, big opportunities here are e-commerce and cash displacement. Cash, $18 trillion spent on cash, and I think people are realizing that currency is a germ-carrying mechanism, and people don't want to be subject to it moving from one person to another person, it's actually catching the joins that way. So I do think cash displacement is going to really, really take off, and we've seen that in terms of the interest of governments to raise contactless limits, the interest of merchants to move to contactless, the interest of issuers, who are lagging behind to issue contactless enabled cards, and I hope we see it, as we start to talk to long tail sellers or merchants, who might have here to for resisted jumping into card acceptance, and they'll realize now that they really need to on a going forward basis if people shun cash. So, I think that's a big opportunity. Likewise, I think e-commerce is a big opportunity, and I think Ryan McInerney in his presentation, talked about the fact that somewhere around $0.15 or $0.16 on every dollar around the world is spent on visa cards and the face-to-face world, but when you move into the world of e-commerce, it's like $0.44 or $0.45 that's a big opportunity for us. And then as you said, and I mentioned earlier, I think there'll be some negative on travel, certainly in the short-term, and I think that people are going to be quite reticent to leave their country in the short-term until there is some advances because they don't want to be, they want to be stuck somewhere. They don't want to be for a prolonged period of time. So I think the degree that travel comes back is not clear, but I think this world is still a world of globe -- full of global citizens who ultimately are going to feel the urge and the desire to get back on airplanes and explore the vastness of the earth. We have not done the work, Darrin to say how these things offset one another. I think at this point we're more interested in studying the things that Vasant referred to in his remarks to get a better sense of kind of just the recovery before we get into how this might create some permanent change. Obviously, these are things we're talking about, but not things we've dimensioned as of yet, but I do think there is some exciting opportunities that will largely your offset or fully offset the changes in consumer behavior as it relates to grab. Let me ask Vasant to answer your question on capital allocation Darrin.

So, with the list of capital allocation, first in line of course, as we want to invest as much as we need to in our business because we still think the long-term growth opportunity remains extraordinary, and to that end, even as we scale back expenses, we have preserved the investment in critical growth areas like new payment flows, including Visa Direct, B2B in our value-added services. So that's part one. Part two is M&A. We remain very focused on adding to our capabilities where it makes sense through acquisitions, and there may be some opportunities here over the next months and years, and certainly Plaid is something we're looking forward to closing on as Al said, but M&A would be next in line. In terms of dividends, there has been no change in our dividend policy. In fact, last week, our board approved our regular quarterly dividend. So those of you who are owners of our shares will get that soon. And finally, in terms of buybacks, we have had no changes in plans. As I mentioned in my comments, we have bought back $3.2 billion in stock in the second fiscal quarter. So through the first-half, we bought back $5.6 billion. So we're a little ahead of our pace. Since we view this particular crisis as structurally one that does not diminish our business in the long run and most likely enhances it, and we don't see any long-term secular trend lines changing. We felt that in period, in the month of March, our stock was trading below our views of intrinsic value, and therefore we were buyers. So there has been no change in our buyback program. We do have plenty of liquidity. We're watching that very closely. As I told you, we had $13 billion in cash and cash like instruments on hand, and then we issued $4 billion in debt. So, as we speak, we're close to $17 billion in cash on hand. So we are very focused on ensuring adequate liquidity, and that is cash on hand not counting our revolver or even our access to commercial paper markets. So, hopefully that addresses all your questions.

Yes, it's helpful. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, thank you for taking my question. So I have a follow-up on e-commerce, as you noted that e-commerce very good for you as cash is simply not an option. Can you expand upon other benefits Visa sees in e-commerce in terms of greater sought services, tokenization value added as we process more of those digital transactions. And then as a follow-up based on what you're seeing in the market is the uptick in e-com usage coming from people who are already very avid e-com users or is it new demographics GOs were also coming online, who were historically reluctant to buy. We're just trying to figure out if new payment habits and digital views are being acquired now?

Thanks for the question. So in terms of e-commerce, certainly it gives us an opportunity amongst other opportunities to sell our CyberSource capability as more and more businesses I think are going to seek to be omni channel and businesses that didn't realize that they paid the price. I believe Vasant talked about it in his remarks that one of the differences that we saw from country to country was that countries that did not have mature e-commerce capabilities or infrastructure, definitely have suffered more than company or countries that that do have it. I think that e-commerce relationships and tend to be sticky as you can get their card front of digital wallet or front of on file. Certainly, as we've talked about it a few times, the reality is that we can easily see that e-commerce brings new people into the fold that previously wouldn't have spent -- if not having the capability for being able to buy online. So, I hope it does. It accelerates improvements and the experience in e-commerce. I've talked a number of times about the fact that we still have work to do because the abandonment rate is not very -- is still too high, authorization rates can be too low, and there's a real opportunity to improve those and improve the experience and FRC is one of the reasons that we want to do that. We're also seeing that new users in e-commerce is up materially in segments like food and drug, and restaurant, and QSR, where e-commerce was never big before as people are looking to have alternatives to just the food that they get from the supermarket. So we're seeing that uptick as well.

Last question, Jordan?

Our last question comes from Eric Wasserstrom from UBS. Your line is open.

Great, thanks very much. Can you hear me all right?

Yes.

Okay, great. So I know it's a little difficult in the context of the withdrawn revenue guidance, and as you've underscored, there's many conflicting dynamics there, but is there some way that you could help us frame how we should be thinking about maybe the puts and takes in operating margin? Obviously, you've done a lot to contain costs. It sounds like there's going to be some yield shifts on the revenue side, of course, you've got Plaid on the horizon. So, is there some way over time you could help just frame what operating margin might look like or within some bounded range or something?

Sure. I think you can sort of get to it yourself. So, we gave you a sense of what our second-half expense growth is going to be. We said it would be flat, including acquisitions, it will be down in the low single-digits excluding acquisitions, and we hope to do better than that. We're still working on some expense reduction programs. So, if you have a general idea, and remember our non-operating income will be higher, non-operating expense will be higher because of interest expenses going up and interest income going down. So, you sort of know those lines. So, it all depends on where revenue comes out. So, you can model revenue decline, you know where expenses are, and it will tell you what the -- you know the margins will then end up being. As we've always said, we think of this as margins are an outcome, not an objective, but they're a function of what your revenue growth is versus your expense growth. The expenses are declining in the low single-digits, but your revenues are declining more than that, as is likely in the third quarter, then it will have a margin impact. In terms of modeling revenues, I mean, we've given you the most up to date information as to what the trends are. So, as we look at it, it all depends on do you think where we are is the trough, when do you think we will start to recover from that trough, and then what is the nature of recovery going to be, is it going to be a sharp V shaped recovery, is it going to be more like a U shaped recovery as people talk about, where it's a slow start and pics up steam or it will be -- is it fits and starts where you get some recovery and some stabilization, and then another recovery and some more stabilization, and as you saw, I mean this varies across categories, and it does vary across countries. So there's a lot of variables here, which is why we've chosen not to give you any kind of specific forecast. We'll wait and see.

Thanks for the clarity.

And with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to email or call us and Investor Relations team. So thanks again and have a great evening.

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