I hope it hasn't been lost. There's more than an internal restructuring of Interac needed with respect to how this debit marketplace evolved. So the level playing field I'm talking about, so consumers and merchants can overtly choose Interac, away from the competitors and their various pricing schemes and so forth, is imperative to our success, as are rules of the game. Interac being the only competitor in the market that is subject to scrutiny and review of all its new products sets, which we do today through the CPA, and the other competitors rolling out contactless and PIN-less products after a decision made in Purchase, New York, or Foster City, with not the same level of scrutiny or review, is a problem. So I am trying to talk well beyond the restructuring with respect to Interac's success.
You talked about STAR and NYCE. In answer to a previous question...they were private and then became public companies. The difference between our two strategies and our two markets--and as I said, it's a massive difference because this is a two-sided market--is that when Visa went in aggressively to the debit market, they were already there. They already had an acceptance base from coast to coast in the United States. So when that acceptance base is ubiquitous among all the brands, what happened there was that the competition shifted to how they could keep issuer cards within their brand, and unfortunately in STAR's case, their demise was when they started raising interchange to try to incent the issuers, because it was a card battle only. It's not the case here in Canada. You've heard prior testimony that one of the main problems for Visa and MasterCard--and we see it in their pricing strategies--is trying to get merchant acceptance.
So at Interac, I believe our restructuring, through partnering with the merchant community, can have a low-cost model, and if the merchants are architects of their own future in choosing Interac in the majority of the segments, I think we have a viable strategy with respect to Visa and MasterCard.