Industry committee  Sure. Again, I listened to the witnesses from the other day, and I have to say some of the rates they were talking about bore no relationship to our interchange rates. They were much higher. Again, to refer back to my speech, that's because we don't control end-user pricing. I

Industry committee  Yes, but for any given merchant, there are only three consumer rates.

Industry committee  There were three rates before. Individual merchants went from having three rates to having three consumer rates, but there are 19 rates because there are rate reductions for certain categories. There are volume recognition advantages. Catherine Swift mentioned 100 rates in the

Industry committee  Honestly, I don't know if it's useful information for the consumer. I think the merchant needs to know how interchange is priced. Clearly, we intended to make it simpler by providing customized reports, and clearly we have to work on making sure our small merchants are taking adv

Finance committee  That's not correct. That's not the model we work on.

Finance committee  Sure. When we set our rates, what we're trying to do is maximize participation in the system by merchants and cardholders. If we, for example, were to follow the model the RCC thinks exists, we would delight issuers and lose all of our merchants and then eventually make our iss

Finance committee  Sure. Again, I listened to the witnesses from the other day, and I have to say some of the rates they were talking about bore no relationship to our interchange rates. They were much higher. Again, to refer back to my speech, that's because we don't control end-user pricing. I

Finance committee  Yes, but for any given merchant, there are only three consumer rates.

Finance committee  There were three rates before. Individual merchants went from having three rates to having three consumer rates, but there are 19 rates because there are rate reductions for certain categories. There are volume recognition advantages. Catherine Swift mentioned 100 rates in the

Finance committee  Honestly, I don't know if it's useful information for the consumer. I think the merchant needs to know how interchange is priced. Clearly, we intended to make it simpler by providing customized reports, and clearly we have to work on making sure our small merchants are taking adv

Industry committee  That would be the bank's decision.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  We make money when you spend money, not when you borrow money.

Industry committee  That's correct.

Industry committee  I didn't say it was simpler. There's going to be a variable value delivered to different merchants. For example, a gas station isn't going to experience the same increased sales that another merchant might. So we lowered the rate to recognize that there is a finite limit on the a