I would echo some of Mike’s statements. I mean, you deserve an answer. No, there would be no additional fees for mobile payments. Hopefully that satisfies that question.
But from an interchange perspective, we feel that with interchange there needs to be a balance, to bring more consumers into the system and more merchants. If we're out of balance, we lose merchants or we lose cardholders, and the system starts eroding.
So it's a balancing act. We feel that the interchange rates, as they are today, are commensurate with the value that merchants get. I'm assuming we're specifically talking about online merchants, given the topic of the committee.
As was noted in my opening remarks, credit cards enable merchants to do e-commerce and make the savings of not having brick-and-mortar infrastructure, leasing and whatnot. Sure there are expenses with e-commerce, but there are significant savings for merchants to open up an e-commerce environment. Credit cards, quite frankly, facilitate that.
There is competition in the marketplace. From an acquiring perspective, certainly with element one of the code of conduct, it adds a layer of transparency never seen before—for merchants to understand the pricing that acquirers are providing to them, shop around, and get a better deal. There are better deals to be had. They just have to negotiate and understand it.