On the fraud side, on ease of use, a lot of these systems don’t have all of these functionalities. So those are things that we focus on. So we’re focused on providing the best choice to our customers. We don’t mind the competition, but we actually see quite a bit of opportunity for us to use these rails for the open banking type of solution that you just asked about. So interesting space, and it drives the overall economic growth, digital economic growth.
Operator: Your next question comes from Trevor Williams with Jefferies.
Trevor Williams: Sachin, I was just hoping you could put a finer point on the growth algorithm within the full year revenue outlook. I know you mentioned some of the cadence dynamics with VAS and currency vault, but any help on what you’re assuming for volume and transaction growth relative to the January trends, rebates and incentives, pricing? Any help on those would be great.
Sachin Mehra: So look, I’m not going to give you a specific kind of forecast as it relates to what we’re assuming from a driver standpoint. We’ve kind of shared with you what our base case is. And the base case continues to assume that the consumer spending remains healthy, and we’re reflecting in the current spending dynamics from an overall kind of volumes and transaction standpoint. I think to your question on pricing, it’s no different than it’s been in the past. We always price based on the value we deliver to our customers. And we will continue to do that wherever it makes sense across the globe. And we kind of have new things which we’re launching, there’s new value we’re delivering to our customers. And as we do that, we’ll continue to price for that.
On specifically the Contra question. I think — the important thing to note on Contra is that, at the end of the day, Contra is enabling volume growth, right? We pay incentives and rebates to our customers to bring more volume onto our network. And as we do that, we’re paying for that. For the first quarter, we expect our Contra as a percentage of our payment network assessments to be roughly similar to what you saw in Q4 of 2023. I would tell you, on a full year basis, it’s going to be entirely a function of how we see deals play out, what the pipeline is. Obviously, we know what the outlook is from a pipeline standpoint. Some of that will come to fruition. Some of that will not. There’ll be other things, which will move in and out. And so I’m not going to kind of share with you what the full year outlook is on Contra.
But for Q1, I can kind of give you my thoughts, which are, we expect that Contra as a percentage of payment network assessments will be roughly similar to what we saw in Q4 of 2023.
Michael Miebach: We have time for just one more, Brianna.
Operator: Our last question comes from Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: I appreciate all the comments so far. My question is on real-time payments. And Michael, you did have some incremental comments there on TCH, but saw the TCH renewal. Obviously, you have a global set of capabilities here. My question is, what’s the runway and what drives it? Is it the use cases rather than more countries? And then if it is use cases, what are some of the use cases that you see coming up that are exciting from a conversion perspective?
Michael Miebach: Right. So first of all, the strategic relationship here in the U.S. with the Clearinghouse is important to note. Back when in 2016, ’17, real-time payments really took off. This is when we invested in VocaLink and VocaLink was a partner with the Clearinghouse at the time. So a strong and more strategic renewal here is a big statement, and it speaks to our position in real-time payments. 10 out of the top 50 GDP countries, we either operate, are providing software and services to the real-time payment system. So it’s real. It’s there as the name indicates, and it’s carrying a lot of volume for us in itself. That’s an interesting business. But it’s much more than that. It’s much more than that as we’re talking to various players, including ones that I mentioned about new applications that come on top of that.
Coming right back to the Chase Pay-by-Bank example, here is access to rails on one hand and then a set of additional data that turns a simple payment that gets money from A to B to something that’s a value-add payment. That is where we’re going to go. And these use cases will play out in a somewhat different way. It is obviously always our interest to find global solutions, but it’s also — this is a rather more geographic specifically driven space. So we’ll have to see where that all lands. So we keep that in mind, which is why we’re not driving into many more markets right now. We’re the most critical markets and here we’re staying very close to where that is going. But it’s applications and it’s scaling volumes in the markets that we’re in, it’s where the focus is.
Devin Corr: Thank you, Michael. Any last comments?
Michael Miebach: Well, as always, thank you for your support to Mastercard. Thank you for listening to Sachin and me, and thank you to everybody at Mastercard for making all this work. We’ll speak to you in one quarter. It’s also unusual to note this is on a Wednesday today. I don’t think we ever had that before. Certainly, for me, this is the first Wednesday. We’ll see how we mix it up next time. Speak to you in a quarter. Thank you, and bye-bye.
Sachin Mehra: Thanks, everyone.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.
