Name: Interchange Income Under Pressure
Uploaded: 2026-09-29T16:30:08.471Z
Duration: 49 min 22 s
Description: Interchange Income Under Pressure

Transcript for "Interchange Income Under Pressure": Good morning. For anybody that's, that's already joined, we will be getting started here in about a minute and a half. So thank you for your patience. Let everyone join. If you just joined, we have not started yet. We'll give it about another minute. We'll get started here in about thirty seconds, everyone. We're just letting all the attendees get in. Alright. Good morning, everyone. My name is Brett Rawls. I serve as PRI's head of client engagement. Some of you when you signed up, I know that you saw that one of our partners, Mike Holt, was listed as the host. Mike had to be on-site with a client today. So, unfortunately, he can't join us, but I'm filling in for him. I really appreciate all of you that are able to join us live, this morning. But, also, if you are listening via the recording, welcome. Looking at the attendee list, it is just so good to see so many of our customers and friends of PRI that we've worked with through the years. But also, I wanna say a very special welcome to those that are joining us that we haven't had the chance to work with yet. Really looking forward to chatting with everyone today. So today, we're talking about interchange income under pressure. You know, as I believe if you if you talk with PRI, we have made you very well aware that interchange revenue is one of the largest, if not the largest source of non interest income, for a community bank. And we know that there's just so many factors that impact its performance. So when we see changes, and I know today a lot of institutions are seeing, interchange revenue decline, it's hard to glean where the revenue is is being lost. One of the things, the strengths here at PRI through the payments team, is identifying and understanding all the components. But more importantly, it's formulating and implementing practical strategies to help you improve results. I had the opportunity last week. I was in both Iowa and Minnesota, speaking with groups from both of the bankers associations, and I was talking with banks about, in one session, growing revenue, within the debit portfolio, but then in the other, talking about balancing fraud prevention with profitability. Some great conversations, after each of the sessions with the bankers. So I know that this is definitely a a timely topic, so I'm glad we're getting a chance to to review it with you today. Over the next hour, we're gonna have, our payments PRI experts, talk us through some of the issues that are facing interchange income. But before I go any further, I do wanna point out we have a q and a feature. If you see on your screen the q and a box, when we get to our panel discussion part of this, we'll be reviewing as many of the questions as we get as possible. Anything that we don't get to, we will be sure to follow-up with afterwards. But please take advantage of that. You can start now. If you've got any question that you brought into the session today, hopefully we address some of them as well, but but take advantage of using that that Q and A feature. Before I introduce the full panel though, I'm going to ask our Director of Payments, Candace DeBarger, to join and share some of her thoughts. You see Candace's bio on the screen, but a few things that, you know, just jump out at me in in having the opportunity to work with Candace here at PRI. She's got forty years of industry experience. You know, I just love the fact she was on the original team that launched the mic the Maestro network, in the nineties. She was on the leadership team that launched Mastercard's debit processing platform. Candace has negotiated over a 100 network brand agreements for banks, and that is banks of all sizes. She is agnostic to to bank size when it comes to doing that. She's also negotiated more than 50 card processing contract renewals, and I know, through her work here at PRI that that number continues to raise each year. She'll probably touch on some of the numbers of business that that we do, at PRI. My favorite thing though about doing these with Candace is that she loves to share a fun fact with me that I can then share with our audience. And so this time around, she shared with me that she got her, she earned her black belt in Thai kickboxing a few years back. Now that alone is a fun fact. But if you know Candace, she's got more to add to that. As part of her test in earning the black belt, she had to fight two two separate 19 year old boys. And and the quote that she gave me was, you know, you never know how bad a punch in the face hurts until you get punched in the face, which as she and I laugh, that's a perfect segue to what we're talking about today. And it reminds me of that famous Mike Tyson quote that everybody has probably heard, you know, where he said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. So both Candace DeBarser and Mike Tyson have very famous quotes that are gonna lead us into talking about interchange income today. So, Candice, I'll let you take over. Thank you, Brett, and, hello, friends. It's great to see so many familiar names on the list, and we're thrilled you're here, and I'm happy to be here as well. The topic of interchange is not a science. It is not clear cut. It is nuanced, complicated, and it fluctuates with regularity. In the next half hour, I'm going to share some trends that we've seen over the last eighteen months, not only with interchange, but also with fraud detection and mitigation. At the end, we'll bring in two of my friends and colleagues along with Brett, and we're going to throw caution to the wind and answer your questions in real time. We get calls all of the time from CFOs and presidents saying, my interchange is going down. Now, that's a very broad statement, and I almost always follow-up with numerous questions about volume fraud and GL constructs. But nonetheless, interchange revenue is decreasing for many community institutions. So, we're going to start this off by asking you a question, And we're going to ask you, have you seen a change in your interchange? Go to the go to polls tab in the bottom left hand of your screen, or it's actually in the bottom left of mine, and you'll see the results. Okay. We're seeing down. No. I don't know answers. That's kind of interesting. Okay. So more down than up, which is not a surprise. When we first start thinking about interchange, we first have to consider average ticket. And I apologize if I've done a project for you because you've heard this before. Average ticket is defined as the total purchase dollar volume divided by the number of purchase transactions. What on average your cardholders spend every time they make a purchase. Average ticket is not a good or bad number. It is largely a reflection of the demographics of your retail branch footprint and the proportion of small business spend in your card portfolio. If you're a heavy commercial bank with a lot of small business customers, those small business cardholders tend to spend much more than consumers when they transact. So you would have an higher average ticket. Average ticket is a predictor of your interchange revenue per transaction. So interchange rates, and there are many for each network. Each network sets their own, and there are a number of criteria. Mastercard's and Visa's interchange rates, you know, take a whole eight by 10 piece of paper to get through. They generally, though, have two components. One is a flat fee per transaction, like, let's say, 10¢. The other is a percentage of the dollar value of the transaction, like 1%. So the higher your average ticket, generally, the higher your interchange revenue per transaction because of that percentage based component. PRI keeps and tracks all sorts of data for our projects, and the graph on this screen tracks average ticket by region. And I will let you know the region was set by me using, you know, my view of the world. If you wanna know what region I put you in, just follow-up with me later. But in general, average ticket has increased $2 per transaction from the beginning of twenty twenty four to q two of twenty twenty six. We do see a bit of regional variation as well as a bit of softening in q two. However, I would expect average ticket to continue to climb for the rest of 2026 given recent gas price climbs. And gas prices are why the Midwest has continued to increase while other, segments have regions have decreased. Because gas prices are influenced not only by the price of crude oil, but also by the cost to transport gas to the point of sale. And the Midwest is farthest away from both coasts and has the largest transport cost. So their gas prices haven't gone down. They've just continued to climb. So theoretically, we would expect that interchange revenue per transaction would track similarly to the average ticket graph on this page, but that's not necessarily the case. Overall, it's been bad news for interchange, especially in the Southeast. Spoiler alert, Walmart. I'll talk about Walmart in a minute. We have consistently seen interchange per transaction decrease in 2026 with a marked drop in q two and q three, depending on which combo, network combo we we're measuring. But why is that? So merchants and merchant service providers are getting more savvy and more aggressive, and they're forcing networks to make interchange deals that benefit them and hurt community institutions. So remember that merchants, thanks to our dear friend, senator Durbin, won the right to control transaction routing as part of Reg II. They have more leverage than you do. So we've seen Amazon, Uber, Walmart, and other large merchants make sudden and, frankly, unanticipated, to us anyway, routing changes as their network deals expire. The cause is decreased. So the network deals tend to be one years, two years in length, and as they come off and someone like Walmart begins routing their transactions to another network for less money, that's what causes these downward trends that you see. So as an issuer, I'm often asked what control do I have. So I wanna talk about two things. And first, what you control is your network stack. So your network stack is the platter of choices that you hand to the merchant every time your cardholders transact. So for instance, I'll give you two examples. There are, well, there are at least seven because they're that's what's tracked on this slide. Pulse, Maestro, Mastercard, Excel, Interlink, and Visa. The better the platter that you serve the merchants, the better your revenue. So the graph on this slide, and I will apologize for the art eye chart, it tracks seven different network combinations effective interchange per transaction over the last four years. And there are three things I wanna say about this. First, different networks, PIN networks, pair differently to produce different revenue results, Mastercard versus Visa. That's what creates this these different combination. So Pulse Mastercard is going to produce a different revenue combination and profile than Pulse Visa because of merchant routing and merchant deals. The second thing is look at this volatility. I think that underscores my earlier statement that interchange is complex and fluctuates. Right? The third thing, though, is that 2026 sees the different combination coalesce sadly downward into about a range of 6¢ per transaction difference. While that may seem small, at large scale, 6¢ per transaction can profoundly impact your debit card profitability. So what can you do as an issuer? Two things. One, hire PRI to evaluate your network stack a year before your Penn network agreement expires, eighteen months before your brand agreement expires. We can help you select the best providers to protect your revenue. But most importantly, grow. If your transaction volume is growing, you may not even notice that your revenue per transaction is decreasing. But growth takes investment. Grow your deposit base, market to your debit cards, pay attention to your debit card profitability, and use your provider's resources to help you with all of those efforts. Perhaps you saw this announcement in the industry press a few weeks ago. It will be music to consumers' ears. Walmart was the last big merchant holdout to implement contactless acceptance. But I've had a few bankers assume that Walmart deploying contactless at their stores will help their interchange revenue because their assumption is that all contactless transactions route through Mastercard or Visa rails. Unfortunately for you, that is not necessarily true. Merchants can still route contactless transactions to any of the networks in your network stack. In general, it's based on price and speed. So take, for example, McDonald's. McDonald's cares more about speed since one second less wait time means millions in revenue. It's why they were were they the first? Maybe not the first, but they were among the first to adopt contactless acceptance. They do tend to route contactless transactions through Mastercard and Visa because Mastercard and Visa are faster have faster response time than the PIN networks. Besides interchange, there are other fact factors that influence your debit card profitability. Many, if not most, issuers don't track or don't notice what they're paying their PIN network. Your PIN networks charge what often are called switch fees to move data and money in between merchants and you. The PIN network's fee schedules have grown much more complex in an attempt to emulate Mastercard and Visa, and Mastercard and Visa pricing is very complex. But they're also trying to monetize that growth in average ticket. So all of the pin networks charge flat fees per transaction, usually different fees for face to face with the pin transactions versus pinless or ecommerce transactions. And they all charge basis points on the dollar of the value of the transaction for ecommerce pin list transactions. This graph on the on the slide shows what PRI clients are paying per transaction to their pin networks. Because of the basis points on the dollar value of the transaction, the line generally tracks with average ticket because as average ticket increases, so do your fees. So don't attempt to negotiate your core and EFT agreements without also negotiating your Penn network fees. We often do all three together or at least simultaneously and can help you to maximize those savings. Your debit card profitability is also influenced by a laundry list of other factors. It's like a little onion that needs to be peeled apart to fully understand what is influencing your results. I think everyone understands the impact of processing costs. Your monthly invoice is enormous and complex. But did you know that nearly all processors increase your line item expenses by some percentage every year? How much depends upon inflation or your agreement? So even if you negotiate a smoking hot deal, your prices are still going to go up year after year. Did you know that Visa and Mastercard will give you incentives for debit card exclusivity? The more dollars your cardholders spend, the more money they'll be willing to give you, even if you're small. We do around a 100 of these projects every year, and these arrangements can be very lucrative for you. I already talked about transaction volumes. Growth can obfuscate any number of issues. Debit cards are not set it and forget it, and they are a fragile flower that need to be tended and nurtured, which is very important to your profitability. Your GL constructs also play a role in your ability to track your debit card profitability. I have seen numerous issuers, large and small, use one GL or maybe two for debit card income and expense. The more you throw into that one GL or two GLs, the less you're able to fully understand what is causing fluctuations. And the more that's in there, the less you'll see those fluctuations and you don't see the issues before it's too late and before you foregone an awful lot of profitability. Last, everyone's favorite subject, fraud. Fraud is a necessary evil in conjunction with debit cards. If you have listened to a previous webinar that I did, I guess, a few years ago, you've heard me say that the only way to eliminate all fraud is to decline every transaction, which, of course, is not a viable strategy. We're stuck with some level of fraud. The trick is to balance the zeal to keep fraud losses down with the need to approve real purchases to make revenue and keep your customers satisfied. What have we seen lately on fraud? The box at the right is a real excerpt from one of our card partner decks. PRI's card partner service, measures debit card profitability and tracks about 60 different KPIs each quarter, and we make recommendations for improvement, including looking at every single fraud case that's shared with us. So this box is very typical of what we are seeing. I call it death by a thousand cuts. So, formally, we were always on the lookout for the big ticket items, like a $700 purchase at Best Buy. But the bad guys have gotten smarter, and they're getting away with numerous small dollar purchases that escalate as you keep approving. So look at that bottom bullet. One this is real data. One cardholder did 106 transactions at the same merchant on the same day, all for small dollar amounts. How many transactions is reasonable for one cardholder at the same merchant? My gut says eight on the same day, my gut says eight or nine. You may think it's higher or lower, but one thing, it sure as heck is not 106. So I've been suggesting that issuers write new rules to combat this trend. It probably isn't a surprise that money transfer merchants are an interest to fraudsters. Your rules for those merchants should be more stringent than other merchant categories. So take a look at the top bullet on this in the text box. Is it realistic that a consumer would do nine money transfers on one app and then fund a money transfer wallet on another app all on the same day? I don't think so. And I I think this client's processor should have caught that one. We also wanna highlight one of our PRI card partner clients that instituted a policy for timely disputes. If one of their cardholders disputes a transaction more than sixty days after the transaction date, they decline that dispute. I think most issuers give much more time than that. But given the proliferation and use of mobile banking with the immediate ability to view transactions, this issuer set the sixty day policy to great effect. They save four saved $4,200 on one case and $11,000 over six months. We asked the bank about their regulator reaction, and we heard that their regulators did not comment on the policy when they were made aware of it. So they know about it, and they're not telling them to change, which I thought was very interesting. Now we have one more poll question that sets up our last slide. So, again, click on the go to polls tab. Have you gone outside your processor for help with fraud? Oh, a couple of yeses, but still more noes. Interesting. Sixty forty. That's more than I would have guessed, honestly. Okay. We've seen some PRI clients use third party fraud detection and case management solutions to augment or replace what their card processor does. Not all processors are created equal at fraud detection, and we do see issuers exploring other options. We are aware of PRI clients using the first two providers on the list, Redi and Centrix, but we wanted to give you other options as well. And our clients have used both of those organizations very successfully. So if you aren't meeting regularly with your processor to review cases and fraud rule performance, you should. And if you can't craft individual fraud rules to combat your particular challenges, you should be able to and maybe consider a third party to hone your fraud strategies. Last, before we go to questions, I have many bankers concerned about stablecoins and merchant deployments that would eliminate networks and interchange. And while we all understand that merchants like Walmart would like nothing better, remember that the consumer has a say in all of this. Multiple technologies introduced over the last twenty years that ultimately failed failed because they did not address consumer needs. So what do consumers want and demand of their payment technologies? Ubiquity. Their card, wallet, token, whatever you want whatever the payment device is, it needs to work everywhere, all over the globe in basically the same way. Convenience. It needs to be easy to use and to manage. And last, speed. It needs to be fast. Immediate gratification is a true thing. Any technologies that do not address all three will likely ultimately fail. Payment cards, both debit and credit, do address all three and are highly ingrained in our consumer habits. They will take a long time to replace. So now we'll bring back Brett along with my colleagues, and we'll answer your questions. Alright. Thank you, Candice. I always learn stuff when I hear from Candice, but my favorite line was a smoking hot deal. I just I think I may throw that into one of my presentations, at some point. So, yes, I'd like to introduce we've been teasing them. We have we have more folks joining us. A couple of our colleagues, consultants on the payments team. We've got Mark Baker and Adam Brown. They're gonna join us. Quick intro on those guys. Mark Baker, prior to joining PRI, fifteen years experience at Mastercard. He spent eight years on the finance team, another five years as an account manager, working to help, community banks optimize their card portfolios. Also did a significant amount of work on digital partnerships. I'm going to give a fun fact on Mark, and I love it, because, well, he roots for a different college football team than I do, but Mark Mark lives and dies by by sports. And on the weekends with college football, his favorite team is the Georgia bulldog. So he goes to the highest of highs with the Georgia Bulldog, but then he lives and dies by the performance of the New York Jets on Sundays. And so he comes crashing back down to Earth, typically with with his fandom there. But, but Mark Mark, very, very well versed in this and and looking forward to having him join us. Also, with us is Adam Brown. Adam, prior to joining PRI, over twenty six years, at Mastercard doing all sorts of things, card operations, franchise risk, and account management. He developed and led a team as part of US region fraud management program. You know, fun fact about Adam, I've got two and I've got to spend a lot of time with Adam. We do we do a good bit of talking on on fraud and and profitability. And I know this, he is the number one girl sports dad. So if Adam is not working, with our clients or working on a project, He is traveling all over the greater St. Louis and Missouri area, but also the rest of the country supporting his girls, who are involved in very competitive volleyball and soccer. But also, Adam and I both have the distinction in a company of less than 60 people, we are two of maybe six or seven ordained ministers, ordained, to to perform wedding ceremonies for either friends or family. So in addition to doing consulting work for you, we also do destination weddings. I know Adam and I would both be thrilled to, to to come out of our normal schedule Absolutely. and and and do that for any for any PRI clients. So but with that, we're gonna get we've got some questions that have come in. We wanna get to as many of them as we can. I'm gonna start and I'm gonna stay with Adam on the topic of fraud because because of the experience that that you've got there, Adam. Here's the question. As a as a community bank, what can you do to fight fraud that the processor isn't doing for them? Yeah. Thanks, Brett. You know, the biggest advantage a bank has over a processor is that community banks can can see the entire customer relationship, not just the the the card transaction. A processor, the brand and the brand networks for that matter, they're very, very good at identifying transaction level patterns. And with technology, it's getting even better every single day. But what the processors don't always have is that full picture. They don't see that customer relationship that the community institutions can see. Things like online banking behavior, ACH, deposit activity, and sometimes just simply knowing about your community and knowing about that your cardholders in community. That's not a minor thing. You know, you your cardholder you know your cardholders best and it's that knowledge that allows you to detect fraud earlier. And then I think just as important really prevent it in many cases, before the transaction even gets to the process. Okay. Alright. Thank you, Adam. We've got another one here and, if we could change just one thing in our card program to improve interchange performance. Whoo. Where where do we start? And so that seems to be there's lots of options. Mr. Mr. Baker, I'm gonna ask you to maybe take a stab at that Sure, Brett. Thanks thanks for the question. I think the most important thing is. early month on book. You get a cardholder, and the most critical time is to make sure that they, one, have the card, but then, two, use it. So you have to make sure that your marketing plan comes out to say, hey. Here's your card. Get them to open it. Get them to use it, and then follow that up afterwards to to say, hey. You know what? You did this type of transaction, but let's do a recurring payment. Let's do a card on file. Because I know me personally, my card is on file at Netflix, and if I ever had to change it, I'd have no idea how to get there. So you get a lifetime revenue stream. And with all the account updaters that that that the brands are doing, even if you do get a new card number, there's a good chance for most of the major places, your card's gonna already be there. So it's kind of a set and forget and an easy thing. So to me, critical is early month on book getting people to actually use the card the first time. May I add one more statistic on top of that? I agree with everything you said, Mark. I will add that, an active debit card usage user is seven times more likely to buy an additional product from you. So not only is debit card usage key to just making revenue, it's also key to selling in new products to your customer base. So there are multiple reasons why that early month on book strategy is very important to your success as a financial institution. Yeah. Candace, I love that. I mean, part of, you know, we we talk about a lot of different things. This tied specifically to debit card, but you just hit on it. One of one of the benchmarks we like to look at is customer primacy ratio. So having that checking account plus one additional service, well, then obviously stacking to your point on top of that, the debit card is the e it should be the easiest thing to start that trend, but then the stickiness of of building that customer primacy, I think, is is critical there. So good good add. on to that. Here's a question that we have, and and I love this. How should we think about reward programs when interchange margins are are under pressure? Who wants to take a stab at that first? Candace, maybe I'll let you go first. start, but I can already tell you Mark's gonna disagree with me. So you'll get to see that, PRI employees, we don't always agree. We're always still friends, but we don't always agree. And I every time I speak, I get asked this question. Debit card rewards are tough. One of the biggest challenges is that we end up rewarding those who would do those behaviors regardless of the reward because debit cards are about convenience and control. And those, especially without access to credit, they don't have many other choices. So rewarding your cardholders for behaviors they'd already do is not key to your profitability. I'll let Mark give the the dissenting opinion. But what I would say is if you do do rewards, don't use a third party. There are a number of things you can do with core and EFT settings for basically free that can enable a a rewards program that works. Did was I right, Mark? You're gonna disagree with me? Candice, you're always right. But what I I mean, I I also tend to agree with you there is that, you know, you don't wanna reward behavior that's already happening. So that's that's the that's the critical part is making sure if you're gonna do rewards, you have to make sure you're measuring things and making sure you're doing it right. And keep track of your expenses and making sure you're not giving money to, say, me because you're gonna give me 10¢ for every transaction I do. But I already do a 150 transactions, so there's no need to to actually give me any incentive. But I would agree that maybe, you know, don't use a third party. But I think it can be done. I've seen customers banks not use a third party, do it on their own, and they become very successful. A customer I used to deal with grew 10% every year. And I think part of it had to do with the fact that they had some some rewards tied to their actual, card program. But you may wanna separate it out to be, hey. Certain certain certain cardholders, you know, can have the rewards. So have different different products, basically, not a a one size fit all rewards program. Just for fun, Candace, I know we're gonna get to some other questions. We could have Adam break the tie on on who's more correct on that. I won't put him on the spot. I think I think both both of you were. We've got some other questions that that do. have come that have come in. Oh, what where where do you want, us to. go next? Sorry. I lost you for a second if you were talking to me, Brett. I apologize. That's okay. My system froze as systems do tend to do. Okay. Well do have some other questions, right, that I'll I'll tee up. The first there are a few clarifying questions that are easy to get out of the way. One person asked, is average revenue per tran gross or net of processing fees? They track as a net number. We do not. The those were all gross numbers that I, quoted to you. Another question is, is the Visa analytics portal performance metrics reliable indicators of program performance? The Visa analytics portal, which, first of all, you have to be a Visa mem principal member to access. I have seen it demoed, and it is very, very powerful. Mastercard has something similar called the Mastercard Intelligence Center. There are free versions of each. They're both amazing. Honestly, they have wonderful insights, and, yes, I would call them reliable with the the knowledge that neither Visa nor Mastercard see all of your transaction volume. Right? So let's just say the average PIN network is going to take 23 to 36, depending on that PIN network, and acceptance 23 to 36% of your transactions. So Visa can only tell you about the rest. Now they can tell you a lot and so can Mastercard, and you should look, you should look at both, but with the knowledge that it's not necessarily a complete picture. Richard asked, how do we know ignore reggie regarding the sixty day after transaction denial? And I will tell you the first time when I was reviewing this the issuer that we talked about that's, denying untimely disputes. The first time I saw that, I really questioned them. I'm like, you know, I'm you know, Brett pointed out how old I am. He didn't, actually. You were kind enough to say that I'm said I was 50 when I earned my black belt. You said a few years ago. But, I am old enough to remember, like, the one hundred and eighty days measurement. Right? Like, when I first started in the industry, it's a hundred and eighty days. I don't think and I'm willing to be proved wrong. I don't think reggie specifically says sixty days. I believe there is a test of reasonableness. So this issuer chose sixty days as their test of reasonableness. Now I will say different regulators may have different outlooks. Right? Regulator you know, it does depend on the person and their strict or not interpretation of things, but it's certainly something to to question and to ask about. Okay. What are you seeing, hearing, regarding and I'm just gonna say on network, paying interchange for bank back end bank settlement when using USDC. How should banks prepare to negotiate for this new payment rail that Visa is engaging with. So I assume you mean direct credit? Visa Direct? I said I wasn't saying it. But Mastercard also has their version. That's an interesting question. And, Adam and Mark, if you have any thoughts, I'm not sure how I would answer that except to say Visa. Direct and Mastercard what is it called? Mastercard Move? Right? Yep. Facilitating b to b payments, you know, money movement outside of the traditional card rails. I think you should think about this in the context mostly of first commercial payments. If you're a bank facilitating large market merchants or even medium merchants, you should consider this because to a large extent, they're those payments are probably already avoiding the card payment rails today. So those payments are likely check, wire, etcetera. Right? They're not going via card. What. I would yeah. Go, ahead. go ahead. No. Sorry. I thought you were finished. I would just ahead. I would think about this as a supplement to card payments and helping, a, provide a solution for your small business and large market customers to make payments, particularly payments outside of The US. That is a great use for some of these rails that is cheaper for you, faster for the customer, and per and faster for the receiver. So I I would look at it differently than, you know, than just a replacement. Sorry. Go ahead, Brett. No. I was I was gonna jump to another question, but but Nope. certainly want think we're good. to let let you finish that. And I don't know we've got some others that have come in. I wanted to go back. Last week, as I mentioned, I I talked to two different groups, from from different states, and probably the most spirited part of the conversation was around friendly fraud. Right? And and really just bankers looking for, are there any, you know, best practices in in dealing with it? Because we know we've got the reg e, requirements there. E e either of the three of you have anything just high level that we could throw out as a as an option for some best practices in dealing with it? And I vote for you to answer that question. Yeah. I mean, I think well, I'll I'll start and then Candice, Mark jump in. But I think, so I think what you said earlier, Candace, about kind of just looking at at at some of those transaction trends and using the logic test. Right? Is do do some of these does a 109 transactions, you know, make sense, in a twenty four hour period at the same merchant, the same, you know, same day. I think, I think there is a reasonableness, which is I think a good word to use here to push back on this. And one thing that I know in talking with a lot of our PRI clients that we found is that a lot of the, well, you know, there there you do run the risk of pushing back on transactions and specifically friendly fraud. You you know, they're we're not at risk as much as you may think of losing that cardholder, when you push back on on with a reasonable test. Right? When you push back on some of these things, I think there's always a concern at least in the back of my head that I don't wanna push too hard because I don't wanna lose the cardholder. I don't wanna lose them as part of our I don't wanna lose that relationship. But, most people are reasonable. And a lot of times they're like, okay. My my my kid had too many PlayStation transactions. And they would acknowledge it and, you know, changing that relationship, that banking relationship a lot of times is is is more painful than, you know, accepting that I need to be more secure with my card. So I don't know. Candice, Mark, if you had anything else you wanted to add to that. It's kinda my general thought. Nope. I'm with you, Adam. Yeah. I go with I go with the the training of what is allowed to be to be asked and and and the kind of customer service education to to our employees. You know, a lot of times, I know this from traveling all the time, I look at statements and I go, I didn't buy anything from this this place. But then I I keep my receipts for my travel and I see, okay, that was the gas station, but it has a different name. And I think that that sometimes, just a conversation doesn't mean that you won't do right by the customer in that situation, but you've probably trained both your employee and the customer for future situations like that to maybe take care of some of the, I would call more genuine, friendly fraud that that takes place. One. one thing I do I do wanna add, Brett, would be the the the brand networks. Right? They they certainly have some tools. Utilize utilize your relationships with them because they have some tools that help translate a merchant or a card acceptor name into a more recognizable name. So instead of saying, store number 784, it actually says this was from, Walmart or this was from, you know, a a local merchant that you're familiar with. So, make sure please, please, please, make sure that you're utilizing all the resources available to you, which frankly, a lot of times can be the brand networks directly. Yep. K. We have another question. Do some banks it's kind of interesting. I hope my answer will be clear. Do some banks intentionally try to partner with a domestic network that has small market penetration amongst the local merchants, thereby forcing those transactions back back to Visa and Mastercard. Sure. There are some consultants, actually, that will try and do that. My response, however, is that what are their seven ish major one, two, Mhmm. three five ish major pin networks? All of them have market penetration everywhere. Right? I mean, all of them started as a regional network. Pulse started in Texas, star started in California, Excel started up in the Pacific Northwest. They all started some place, but now they're all national networks. So every large merchant takes every network. Right? You've seen all those decals at the at the point of sale. It's a pretty pretty large, sticker that they put on. But you're right. Some small merchants generally and I I will, you know, say, like, in my experience with members of my family owning a small business, their acquirer basically offered them, a package of Visa plus, Mastercard plus one other. Right? And that one other just depended upon where they were. So you can try and choose a network stack that accommodates this, but you also have to think about, okay. Well, if something is routed to Visa or Mastercard, it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get 50¢ interchange. You might get 10 or 12. Right? And then also know Visa and Mastercard cost more. So it's really understanding the whole picture, which hopefully I've conveyed that we do pretty well, understanding really all the nuances before you make your choice. Okay. Here's an interesting question. Who does Square utilize it as its domestic PIN network? And you know what? I don't know the answer. Does any and I'm I'm I'm sure I'm not supposed to say I don't know, but I can find out, and I we know who answered the question. Do any of you know on there? Okay. We'll find out and and let you know. Are there any other questions? Brett, did you get any more teed up to you? Nope. I think I think those are those are all the ones that have come through. If we have something specific to a PRI service, we will follow-up with you individually. So thank you, for those questions. Rest assured, we will come back to you. I see some now coming through, Candace. Oh, here's one. This is a good question. And sorry, Mark. I don't mean to ignore you today, but I think this is a good Adam question. What is your opinion regarding three d Secure? A platter for Adam, our fraud expert. I like three d Secure. I'm a fan. I, it can be a pain. Right? But when when three d Secure, first of all, it's a it's it's kind of the it's the industry standard for card not present, kind of fraud detection, if you will, or validation, authentic authentication, if you will. And when when deployed properly, it works. Right? Three d Secure, though, can be, it can be a little bit of a thorn in the side because, of course, there's chargeback liability concerns, with three d Secure. But when it when used properly by the merchant and the issuer responds appropriately, it does work. And we do see decreases in in fraud and using three d Secure. So my my recommendation to every issuer that I speak to that will that will hear me nerd out on fraud is include rules with your processor about three d Secure. Secure. Make sure that you have rules in place because merchants, if they're suspicious at all, they're gonna prompt for three d secure. And if you don't have an answer for that, that liability is gonna shift to you. Again, three d secure, it does work. It's not going away. Something that we're gonna continue to deal with in the industry. And and I think that's a good thing, right, to stay a step ahead of the the bad guys. So, Candice, Mark, if there's anything else you wanted to add to that, that's kinda my my 2¢. I. agree. Well, I think that that that that rounds us out. We, appreciate all of the the questions and and everyone's time today, both live. And and if you're listening on the recording, thank you so much. For everyone that is on the phone, though, we will be, providing a a full recording of this via a link, that'll be coming out here in the next day, to you all. So hopefully, if if there was something you needed to go back and and revisit, you'll be able to do that. But I stress, any questions that come after this, please feel free to reach out to, to anybody at PRI. We will get you to the right person, but specifically to Candace, Mark, Adam. If if we can be of assistance, we we'd love to do that. And with that said, thank you to Candace, Mark, and Adam for all of your preparation on this. Really appreciate it. Like I said earlier, I always learn something, listening to you all speak and and look forward to doing this again with you. I I do wanna say thank you too. If if those of you that have done PRI webinars in the past, you know we've been on a different webinar system. We are introducing a a new a new platform, and so this was our first one. Hopefully, you enjoyed it. I have to give a special shout out to our production crew. Candice Crosby been raised. Lisa Rowan, thank you for all of the prep work. You are the ones that make Candice, Adam, Mark, and I, at least look the best that we possibly can when we go when we go on air. So thank you. And again, for everyone that that joined us, really appreciate it. Really appreciate the relationship with with PRI and look forward to seeing and talking with all of you again very soon. Have a great week, everyone. Thank