Industry committee  It is. There are circumstances around the world where debit and credit do coexist on a card, so the consumer can choose at the point of sale if they want credit or debit. Brazil is one example I'm aware of. We think prohibiting that within the code would prohibit an option that some consumers would really opt for.

Industry committee  If I could just clarify, I wouldn't characterize Interac as having a monopoly on the debit market in Canada. In fact, as I described earlier, we've launched a debit card with CIBC. That debit card works at Interac, at the point of sale, and then, when it's used to shop online or over the phone or internationally, that piece of functionality that you can expect from Visa works as a debit transaction running on Visa.

Industry committee  The code of conduct is still in early days. It has been 12 months. As I said in my initial remarks, it has brought a lot of very positive aspects to the market. It has made a lot of great contributions in terms of transparency and disclosure. It was always contemplated to be an evolving document—a point in time.

Industry committee  Yes, I absolutely concur, and I--

Industry committee  I would say there is lots of opportunity for government leadership in the area. I'm really glad you asked the question. It is a fantastic role for government to play. Markets in countries such as Finland and Norway continue to squeeze paper payments out of the system and move more to digital, and government has played a lead role in doing that.

Industry committee  I can speak a little for Visa. Financial literacy is a key platform for us. The ability to be able to continue to help people manage their payment choices responsibly and manage credit responsibly is critical. We've had a program for many years called Choices and Decisions, which is a curriculum that we work through the schools in Ontario and in other provinces as well.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for your question. There are a number of challenges for merchants for small businesses when they want to sell online. Certainly the scale that is present in the United States--simply because their economy is ten times bigger than ours--has enabled a very complex set of support partners to open up, allowing business to be facilitated online.

Industry committee  You've got me.

Industry committee  I would add that building a payments network is an extraordinarily complex thing. You start with the principles: security, convenience, reliability, and international interoperability—making sure that your payment product is going to work anywhere that Visa is accepted—and try to make all of those things work among the significantly changing buying and selling environments as we move to consumers' buying stuff on Facebook, buying stuff through a tablet computer, or buying things through a smart phone at the airport.

Industry committee  I would add that I absolutely agree with the points made thus far. The only addition I'd make is that I wouldn't take the notion that we are behind, that the solutions that have been developed and deployed around the world are typically one-off solutions, not globally interoperable.

Industry committee  We're not. These are incredibly complex transactions that are taking place. Your card swipe at the Ottawa airport has to touch the acquirer, potentially a gateway provider, a processor, before it gets to VisaNet. I'm very happy to say that at our level we have what we call “five nines” of reliability--that's 99.999%--with maybe one outage in the last 14 years.

Industry committee  I'd be happy to take that one, or at least take a first crack at it. We're always looking for efficiencies in the system. That includes things like fraud reduction and better credit scoring. We build technologies right into VisaNet that help to reduce those costs. Certainly, as we've moved to chip, there's been some favourable early results in terms of fraud reduction, which we think is good news for the system as a whole.

Industry committee  First off, true confession: I'm not a technology expert. I can tell you, though, that they come from far and wide and that we invest tens of millions of dollars every year in VisaNet protection. That protection ensures that the data, as it's travelling through the network, is not able to be hacked and that the fraudsters who are attacking with a really wide variety of attacks are thwarted before they get too far.

Industry committee  We do. We absolutely do. In fact, we believe we take it a step further, by ensuring—based on our standards that we stand behind—that we're continuing to protect cardholder data in merchant environments. For example, it is critical that a merchant not store complete “track two” data, as we call it, which is effectively the image of the magnetic stripe that is the gold mine for many fraudsters in a pre-chip environment, and still is for a lot of international fraud.

Industry committee  I would add that there is one other key differentiating factor between the Canadian and U.S. environments. I would stand behind what Don said about credit card interchange rates in Canada comparing very favourably with those in the U.S. But one factor that's missing there is debit card acceptance online.