Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 38evaluation 7commitment 7uncertainty 7observation 3prediction 2recommendation 1preference 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
66 published records
“You can see why for a bank like Bank of America that is doing this at such large scale, the idea of a consumer credit card is pretty awesome, because you can take all of these disparate lending programs, consolidate it into just one card, cut out a ton of overhead fees, and make it way more efficient.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“By the way, this is the thing that pushes Visa ahead of what was, I believe, then called Master Charge.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Wow, it's just like the Presidential exceptions for the NFL, an antitrust exemption where, yeah, we're amenable to the fact that you're collaborating, potentially colluding, but it is actually one of the things that we believe will make the country better, so go for it.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Today, we will explore how the whole thing came to be, and try to understand the value that the credit and debit card system creates compared with how much it captures and by whom, in what situations.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think the obvious bull case is, this is just an incredibly powerful network effect that's 50 years in the making, is five-sided, and Lord knows, I can't think of any other five-sided network effects.”
- Publisher
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“As we were talking in my mind, I was like, well, Google's probably the only one that can come close, but wow, Microsoft is higher.”
- Publisher
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“I think, yes, absolutely. I'm not saying this won't happen, but Tim Cook board-level discussion on this.”
- Publisher
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“Once interstate banking regulations get loosened up, they get acquired by Bank of America, of course, in the 1990s. But for the moment, the person running their BankAmericard franchisee program is one Dee Hock, and I think you could really say on Dee's day, the founder of Visa.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I don't know about you, but I get pissed when somebody ahead of me in line starts breaking out cash and coins.”
- Publisher
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“We start where some of you, I suspect know, but the vast majority of you, I also suspect don't.”
- Publisher
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“Any individual bank, if they were to say, this is valuable now, I'm going to go sell it, and then I no longer have any incentive to participate in the network, if that starts happening, then it'll lead to a cascade for the exits, and the network will lose value.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I can't believe we're all the way in season 13, and we haven't talked about this company yet. But as we will get into, it's always been overlooked and underrated.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Something that is also true and also, I think, really underappreciated about Visa is it's also a technology company.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Apple Pay and Google Pay along with it are, I think, by many, many, many orders of magnitude, the most successful quasi alternative payment systems that have actually gotten install bases.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Again, the problem is this gigantic list of a whole bunch of transactions just happened.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think there's basically a law of economic nature, that if your gross margins exceed (call it) 75%–80%, and you are of a certain revenue scale threshold like our gross margins exceed 75%–80% but we're a two-person company with a de minimis amount of revenue in the global economy.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“The reason is basically, no one can ever figure out how to incentivize all the parties that need to change behavior, enough to change the behavior.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think a hundred million cards got dropped in the United States before the government made it illegal to just start randomly issuing credit to people without their awareness or asking for it.”
- Publisher
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“Mine is available on Netflix. It is a show called I Think You Should Leave. I have not laughed this hard in a long time.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think today, that's true. But I do think, based on the research and I was maybe too bias towards Visa, but I think Visa did accelerate past MasterCard.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I'm just saying, I think actually entering this arena introduces a significant amount of risk to the whole franchise that they have to weigh, in a way that some of these other markets don't.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Dee Hock, the founder of Visa—who we will talk a lot about as we go along here—told this great story of how after his time at Visa in his older age, he would start his speaking engagements with a little thought exercise for the audience.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I doubt the Chinese government wanted Visa, ostensibly American corporation, powering their payments.”
- Publisher
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“The name change ends up becoming this incredible growth hack, because what happens is they're the new operating regulations now that mandate that all cards out there, all the previous BankAmericards need to be migrated to Visa cards I think within two years of this being declared or something like that.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Visa, though, and the Visa tech team, they're like, if we're going to go through all this trouble and expense of building another data center, let's use it. They re-architected BASE I and completed architecting BASE II to run concurrently across multiple datacenters as shared operations running across multiple data centers, which I think may have been either the first or one of the first examples of that ever happening.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“B of A instantly at scale is the largest charge card/credit card program, certainly in America, I suspect in the world.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“For banks back then, the only way that you could actually get big for just about everybody else in the industry was to go the corporate route and to go the investment banking route, because you could service very large corporations that obviously were large themselves.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Now the merchants didn't exactly want this thing necessarily, but the way Visa incentivize them to get it is they gave merchants who used it a discount on transaction fees, I think, for a period of time for transactions that happen digitally over the digital network.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think the Fresno population at this point in time was maybe 200,000–250,000 people.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think that might be right, yeah. As a consumer, you would pay a monthly fee to CompuServe, AOL, or whatever, and it would be your internet service provider, but also your email and your portal to the web.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Everybody agrees, mostly, I think just because they wanted to get out of there, go back home, and away from this disaster of a meeting.”
- Publisher
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“Does it make sense that the credit card networks and their associated parties take more value in that world? I think so.”
- Publisher
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“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.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think there's totally also a story that's beyond the scope of this episode, about how banks and in particular Chase aid American Express' customer base over the last set of years.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“One of the guys—I think he was working on BASE I and then maybe got transferred into BASE II—is thinking about the system, and reliability is so important.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Before that, I know there's obviously the IPO event that we want to talk about in 2008 and how the structure of the whole thing changed, but I think you've got a marketing thing that you want to talk about, too.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I will say, there are other people that are participants in this ecosystem that are perfectly fine with it having almost no information or minimal information going across it.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“In other ways, it feels small, but I think we should talk about that in the context of the value added services.”
- Publisher
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“Famously, Walmart and Target too, I think, have been trying to do this for years and years and years, and they never can make it work.”
- Publisher
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“Until I think next year, it's going to go back up to San Francisco when they finished the new building.”
- Publisher
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“I think the one area where there is difference between them, and it's probably less so today but was quite strong through the 90s and 2000s was brand.”
- Publisher
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“I think the last time we checked in on how the settlement worked was around literally collecting paper sales drafts and then starting to mail it around.”
- Publisher
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“I think there are two really important points here. (1) You said, I pay it. I don't pay it, my company pays it, I don't care.”
- Publisher
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“A fellow Seattleite and the book, which is so wonderfully esoterically named Electronic Value Exchange was his, I think, PhD thesis that they turned into a book.”
- Publisher
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“You could almost think about these more as credit unions than the big banks that we think about today.”
- Publisher
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“You're like, sorry, there's a bank behind this and like, oh, is it Visa or MasterCard? I don't know, I don't care.”
- Publisher
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“To illustrate, we will link this in the show notes, but there is an old TV segment from 1993, not that old, pretty recent.”
- Publisher
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“We will later talk about what an astonishing financial profile this business has.”
- Publisher
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“I don't know. You guys figure it out. This sounds like a you problem, not a me problem.”
- Publisher
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“In 2005, there finally was another huge antitrust lawsuit, I think, against both Visa and MasterCard.”
- Publisher
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“Fraud is out of control, $20 million of fraud within the first pilot program, 22% of the credit that they issued to that initial Fresno cohort ends up being default or delinquent, which I think is five or six times what their delinquency rate was before on traditional lending.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“The card underneath it is not terribly important, other than the fact that you need to remember to auto pay it and ideally, it has the one with the best rewards. That's not what most people are thinking, because I think actually, the majority of people don't have rewards-based credit cards.”
- Publisher
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“David, you and I learned in doing some research that the reason why we all get these credit cards from North Dakota is because every state used to have anti usury laws.”
- Publisher
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“I would say, I don't know if the Visa people would tell you this is intentionally obfuscated or if it just ends up being obfuscated, but it's not super easy to figure this out.”
- Publisher
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“I don't know of any other businesses of this size or even 5 or 10 times smaller that have over a 50% net income margin, including MasterCard, which is 43%.”
- Publisher
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“We won't go into all the detail here, except one amazing story we're going to tell. This was actually harder to pull off, if you can imagine that, than forming NBI, because it really is not clear for some of these international banks that it is better for them to be part of the global network than if they could run the table on their entire country.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Lisa did an amazing interview with Ben Thompson a few weeks back if you are a Stratechery subscriber. That is totally worth reading and I prefer listening, so go listen to that.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“It took forever to get here, 40 years or something like that, 50 years. But we will start decelerating because we've already shifted more than half the payments to happen on cards.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think part of the reason why debit cards were forced into existence was that consumers basically demanded it, where they were like, look, if I can pay with a card for this high value purchase, and I don't want to use credit, you're telling me that if I don't want credit, then I have to walk down the street, withdraw cash from my bank, and bring the cash.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“Clearly, this is an example of a five-sided network. But as you add sides to the network, the number of successful examples goes way, way, way, way, way down because it's just so hard.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“I think if he were still alive today, he would probably agree with the characterization that Dee was one of the most amazing zero-to-one entrepreneurs in history, not so much a one-to-n kind of guy, especially when the industry in which you're going from one-to-n and your shareholders and board is all some of the most conservative financial institutions in the world.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston determined that on average each year, a household that uses cash to pay for things pays $149 inflated prices, because all prices no matter how you pay have to go up in order to make it so that paying in cash and cards is equivalent, because in most states, it's actually illegal to charge a meaningful premium to people who are using credit cards.”
- Publisher
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“Visa, we will use your network, because it is the way that I need to accomplish something for my customer, but I'm not just going to turn my customer into your customer.”
- Publisher
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“This is a lot like the Lockheed Martin episode, where I'm actually not sure we can apply the formal definition where we say, what enables them to be more profitable than MasterCard, because together they're like this government enabled duopoly.”
- Publisher
- Acquired
“When everybody on the planet is marketing credit card offers to you, they get the lion's share of the interchange. They actually have a lot to play with in customer acquisition for their cards, because they make the lion's share of the transaction, the interchange.”
- Publisher
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“Neither of which, because of this weird nature of who owned it and how it was set up, people really understood, but both of which are just world class, incredible stories.”
- Publisher
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