How modern payments drive growth and resilience

We serve businesses of all sizes, the largest companies all the way to small businesses around basically any of their payment needs.

This could be paying suppliers, paying their employees, doing M&A transaction, paying their taxes, but it could also mean taking money from consumers who do shopping or financing their supply chain.

So we truly take care of our clients' payments needs end-to-end, and we do that in more than 100 countries.

Umar, why has the payments business become such an important strategic topic for our clients?

So Max, I think as you and I look back over the last decade or so, and we've been in this business for a few years now, payments has really evolved to become core to our clients' own business.

So when we think about our clients, for the longest time, I think you mentioned it many times, Payments used to be something the treasurer did or the CFO did or the cash management part of the business did.

But in reality, as you now look at the evolution, and by the way, the evolution is both in terms of payments infrastructure, but also how our clients do business.

The experience of payments is core to their offering, to their end customers.

So if you are in a ride hailing service, when you get out of the car, The payment just happens.

No one actually thinks about making the payment.

It's actually transparent.

Similarly, if you're on an e-commerce platform, you click a button and you buy the thing.

And that experience is a core part of the value proposition to end customers.

So for our clients, payments is a core part of how they design their product.

And I think this has made payments a core part of their value proposition and their product.

I love your examples around the Ride Hailing app as well as the e-commerce platform.

Because as we often say, for the e-commerce platform, it matters big time if it's a one-click checkout, as you described, or a five-click checkout.

Because with the one-click checkout, their revenue lines are just so much higher.

So payments is no longer just an expense item, but a true revenue enabler.

We

move, on average, something like $12 trillion a day.

And at one point, we even hit $17 trillion as I think our highest record day this year, which means that in a little bit more than a week, maybe a week and a half or so at that level, we are managing to flow the entire world's GDP through our pipes.

And I think no matter if it's 12 trillion, 13 trillion or 17 trillion, we sometimes try to illustrate what it actually means.

What is also important, it comes with a huge responsibility for us running a business that is so important ultimately to the global economy.

that the things we care about, stability, resiliency, and trust, are really important, given that we know how many companies, individuals, and even whole countries rely on that service.