Michael Miebach: Right. So starting with Finicity and then we have the corresponding set of capabilities through our IR acquisition in Europe. We’re also building out connectivity in Australia. Those are the three regions where we’re focused. And open banking does a number of things. Essentially, what we see is a set of use cases here that, that rise to the top and everything that you could do with open banking. In the end, there’s this big vision about Open Data, where people can use their data footprint. Small businesses can use the data footprint for getting access to better services. But for now, what’s really rising at the top is account opening, the example that I already gave. Open Banking for payments, I come to that for a moment — in a moment, open banking for lending and for small business in particular.
So those are kind of the three categories that we feel are particularly relevant right now for payments, it’s really interesting, to your point. Is this a volume driver? It could be. Because the connectivity that we have here, what we’re trying to do is facilitate payments, for example, in non-carded use cases as we have the pay by bank solution in the United States in partnership with JS Bank. So we hope to see significant volume growth out of that. That’s the whole idea. And that builds on our experience with pay by bank in the U.K. This is a somewhat different approach here in the U.S., where our open banking capabilities are the true differentiators. So use cases that matter. That’s the focus. And out of that, we hope to see not only API clicks on account opening, but also payment volume coming through.
That was a second part of the question. My team is just reminding me. Acceptance growth regionally. I mean it comes to the answer actually that Sachin gave earlier where we talked a little bit about payments growth and the regional comparison. So when you think beyond the United States, we see a tremendous growth opportunity. Here in the United States, you would say it’s more new use cases and verticals, and it’s more generally and broader acceptance across the payments landscape in the rest of the world. There’s even significant geographic opportunities to grow. Take Japan, for example. So it’s a country that is what the government has put out a stated policy to drive a cashless Japan. So tremendous upside there. We talked about China earlier on, where we’re investing heavily in acceptance footprint.
So I would say it’s leaning a little more on the international side, but here in the U.S., we’re very busy going for use cases and verticals.
Operator: Your next question comes from David Togut with Evercore.
David Togut: Europe continues to be a driver of differentiated growth for Mastercard. Could you share your insights into your runway for growth in some of your largest countries, for example, Germany and Italy. And maybe frame that in terms of payment volume growth and vast growth opportunity.
Michael Miebach: Let me start off with that question. First of all, I do want to underline what you just said. It is a source of differentiated growth for us. We’ve had a great run in Europe. And it’s a combination of share growth, but it’s also driven by the ways that we find to go after the accelerated secular shift that we saw on the back end of COVID. Countries like Germany really driving up contactless usage, just to give you one example. So overall, Europe has been firing on all cylinders for us. And I come back to the growth algorithm that we laid out for payments, which applies very much in Europe. So European economies will do what they do, but we will continue to focus on share gain, but we will also be very busy to take the share gains that we’ve already had and turn that into profitable volume for us.
Conversions driving that. We had a question on that earlier. So that’s driver number one. And then going into new flows in Europe, there is opportunity there as well. If you look at alternative payment systems, everything that’s going on in Europe, clearly, through PSD3 and so forth, there’s a lot of movement in Europe that we will stay on top as we look ahead into that. Differentiated assets in bill pay in the Nordics and so forth. So we have a pretty broad footprint to participate in all the drivers in Europe. In terms of Services, the services has been strong in Europe for a long time. Our advisers on our consulting business has been a winner for us in Europe for the longest time. And if you look at some of these big wins, that we’ve talked about, they all have a significant contribution of services.
In fact, I would say, oftentimes, they are one of the reasons that we win those deals. So nothing dramatically different there. I think Europe has caught up on secular trend in digitization and we’re firing on all cylinders. We have — we’re fully invested in Europe. As you know, one of the big topics in Europe is European sovereignty, and we are deeply invested in Europe with our efforts, and we’re engaging with — in Brussels in the nation states and so forth, which is very important for us to do to be a partner on their journey.
