Cameron M. Bready
Hey George, it’s Cameron. I’ll jump in on that and I may ask David to comment on the EMV roll-out specifically. As it relates to the growth expectations for the OpenEdge platform, I think you’re correct in that we have been seeing obviously growth trends that are higher or slightly higher than I think our expectations were for the business. As David noted, it continues to perform very much in line with our expectations from both a revenue and operating income perspective. But on a top line basis, I think the growth has been strong and it’s certainly contributing to the 12% growth that we’ve seen in our direct business for the quarter which is a fairly consistent trend from the first quarter of Fiscal ’15 as well.
As far as momentum, certainly I think we see opportunities to continue to expand and grow the business in the back half of the year and as we look at FY’16 as well, I’ll let David maybe jump in on some of the specifics that you referenced around EMV and what not.
David E. Mangum
Yeah, I think George, we expect to be selling an integrated security solution with a very easy path to get live for our partners. We expect to deliver American Express through OpenEdge which is really in the early stages there of delivering that. There is series of verticals or there isn’t necessarily a lot of American Express penetration to date, so we are teeing up that combined with a question Dan asked a moment ago which is cross-selling the products like Decline Minimizer into the APT base — the legacy APT base. We think we set ourselves up for another strong growth year in 2016 and more to come as we talk going forward.
Georgios Mihalos
Okay, great and just a final question from me. Just want to ask, are there any additional pricing initiatives assumed in your guidance for 2015, anything new? And it sort of sounds here from your comments that you expect any significant upside or any real upside coming from additional pricing to hit the P&L more in ’16 than ’15. I just want to make sure I’m thinking about that correctly?
Cameron M. Bready
Yes George, I would say that we continually look at pricing. You know we are in very competitive markets all over the world. I was really referring to was the April change in the interchange in Canada that’s been announced. I was also referring to the EU changes which we expect to be adopted this week by the EU Parliament by this month, but to be implemented over the summer. I would say in general most of the industry including Global Payments looks at pricing twice a year as a systemic matter, George, and that’s tied to or generally is around the MasterCard and Visa announced changes which are typically done in October and April.
It so happened that the Canadian change is around the same time, in April. But in general, most of the industry looks at that because those are clear notice periods where we have to go back to merchants anyway. So what I would say, George, is those are regulatory changes that don’t happen all the time which is why we call them out. But we continually look at pricing in all of our markets to make sure that we’re striking the appropriate balance.
Georgios Mihalos
Great, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Jason Kupferberg of Jefferies. You may begin.
Jason Kupferberg, Senior Equity Research Analyst, Jefferies Group LLC
Thanks guys. Just wanted to pick up on one of the comments that David made a little while ago around the platform consolidation in the US and the OpenEdge business, so with PayPros and APT coming together. Can you just give us a little more detail on the timing of when you think that platform consolidation will be done and will that be a noticeable margin tailwind as we get into Fiscal ’16?
