Cameron M. Bready
I think to take your question reverse, Jason, I don’t think it will be noticeable in the face of the income statement because the sheer size of Global Payments much less our North America business as well. Instead what you have is one of the tactics that will help us continue to deliver operating income growth and margin expansion over time in the United States, North America and then by expansion, globally. The way we’re thinking about migration now is the first, and maybe the most important step, is we’re boarding new customers to Global Payments. Probably the best thing I can tell you right now is we have a good long-term processing relationship with a third party that provides processing now.
We’re happy with the pace of integration. More to come and we’ll feed in those integration benefits over time over the next year or year two. So we can keep chatting about it. But we like the idea of having that as another tactic to help us with 2016 and beyond from a margin expansion perspective.
Jason Kupferberg
Okay, so just kind of more incremental it sounds like?
Cameron M. Bready
Yes.
Jason Kupferberg
And then just as a follow-up on the Philippines joint venture. Can you give us a little bit more detail on the size and growth of that market may be competitive landscape and just kind of how many merchants did Global Payments as well as Bank of Philippines have prior to the JV, just to help us with some sizing?
Jeffrey S. Sloan
Yes. Jason, its Jeff. So we’re very pleased with the partnership with Bank of the Philippines. It’s one of the largest banks as I said in our prepared remarks around the country. We’re already in the Philippines market in two significant ways. One, we have a direct acquiring business in the Philippines market already. And number two, we have our service and our global service center in the Philippines with about 600 employees. So, we think we’re very well positioned alone and even better positioned in combination with our partners at Bank of the Philippines. We’re adding 34,000 additional merchants, Jason, through the joint venture. I think as we said publicly, Bank of the Philippines has 800 branches. So we’re picking up an additional 800 branches in market.
And in terms of the growth rate, while we don’t break out the financials separately for our submarkets of our 13 markets in Asia, what I would say is if you go back to one of the earlier questions about — from Ashwin — as to what drives our business, we’re generally GDP plus derivative type of company. And if you look at GDP, Jason, in the Philippines it’s growing really in the high single digits. It has in the last number of years and expecting as today. So I would say high single digits plus on an organic basis in that business is a good estimate, Jason. And then when you combine the two, I think each one of us is probably in the top handful of folks as a share point in the Philippines already. So I think on a combined basis we would expect to be the second largest player in the Philippines.
Jason Kupferberg
Very helpful, thank you.
Jeffrey S. Sloan
You’re welcome.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Glenn Greene of Oppenheimer. You may begin.
Glenn Greene, Managing Director/Analyst at Oppenheimer & Co Inc.
Thank you. Good morning. A couple questions. Just wanted to go back to the US growth, the 12%. I know it’s early but you’ve sort of embarked on participating in the OptBlue program. I wonder if you could quantify how meaningful a benefit that might have been to the US growth and maybe talk about strategically how important that is to you?
Jeffrey S. Sloan
Yeah Glenn, its Jeff.
I’ll start and Cameron can add some additional color. I think as a tactical matter, it’s very important to us, as I said before, we believe that we are the first large transaction processor in the United States to enter the market with OptBlue. We started the market in May of 2014. You saw this of course really fully in our first quarter.
