David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And of course, the ability to actually be on the network that sends those payments, right? Yes, of course. The network has incredible value. Back to the brand and the marketing. As all these other banks are considering whether to become franchisees of BankAmericard, some of them are like, no, I'm not going to do that. Some of the ones who do become franchisees, really, all the ones who become franchisees become very frustrated. Of course, people are going to start competing systems. Right in this time over this year or two period, a bunch of local, geographical, competing credit card systems by various bank consortiums come together. Those pretty quickly all merge into a national association called Interbank, which—spoiler alert—Interbank is MasterCard. At this point in time, Interbank is a Franken network. There's no common brand, mark, or visual identity for all of these cards. Now, you're trying to make this payments network operate. How do you as a consumer know that my card that I got from XYZ or Bank of Illinois that's part of the interbank network, supposedly? Now I go somewhere, I've got that card, it looks like one thing. I'm looking at this store at this restaurant or whatever. They've got a thing on the door that says they take something that looks totally different. I don't know that this is going to work, even though it actually might work because it's part of the MasterCard Interbank network. I see. It's like when I'm trying to figure out I have to keep pulling up Alaska Airlines partner network to figure out what international airline I should fly since I pay no attention to anything other than, well, it's Alaska. Was it Oneworld?…

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