Sure. With respect to the premium cards, one of the things I did look at more recently was the difference in behaviour. Do the holders of premium cards have different behavioural characteristics? And the answer is they actually do.
I think that MasterCard mentioned that they have an average spend in their portfolio of $24,000 apiece to qualify for a premium card. And when I looked at the behaviour across our merchant categories—and this was only the last month, so it's only a month's worth of data—the average transaction size of those particular cardholders was markedly higher. It was a lot higher than I suspected it would be. The lowest was in the gas station category, where their cards were a little bit bigger, but they didn't spend that much more; it was a little bit more on food; and it went all the way up to as high as 40% in certain merchant categories.
So it is clear that those particular customers are bringing more value to merchants. But at the end of the day, it's costing merchants more money than they're used to paying. In large part, I think that's why we're here today, because the increases were much more aggressive than I think anyone was expecting, and no one really had a good sense of how many premium cards there actually would be. The merchants couldn't budget for them, and I think that has definitely caused some issues. I think your association is a great example of those issues.
