Key questions and answers from the second quarter earnings call conducted by MasterCard Inc. (MA: chart) on July 31, 2008.
Tien-Tsin Huang (J.P. Morgan):
Can you comment on monthly trends in general on U.S. purchase volume growth in the second quarter?
Martina Hund-Mejean: We saw during the quarter it came down a little bit in June. It was not a cabalistic decline. What we are seeing here, on average, for the second quarter, we are seeing as a trend, also, for July.
Tien-Tsin Huang (J.P. Morgan):
On G&A, did you quantify the higher severance costs and what kind of savings you expect to get out it?
Martina Hund-Mejean: We can certainly do that. If you just looked at the G&A expenses overall, you saw a 15.7% increase of which 3.3% were related to currency fluctuations, and then in terms of the severance, I can guide you that that was about 3% of that.
Tien-Tsin Huang (J.P. Morgan):
And the savings you expect out of that, going forward?
Martina Hund-Mejean: We do obviously expect some savings, otherwise we would not have done that. But it’s really realigning our work forces with the kind of business needs we’re seeing forward. Again, as you know, we are still investing in the business but we are also seeking to expand our operating margin.
Patrick M. Burton (Citigroup):
Comment on cross border travel?
Martina Hund-Mejean: What we have seen is that cross product growth has actually accelerated over the last year. In particular when you looked at the fourth quarter of last year and it had kind of continued into the first quarter of this year.
We are talking relatively still extremely healthy growth rates of almost 19%. We really have not seen any change in travel patterns. The travel patterns are really still pretty much the same from what we saw before.
We saw the Latin Americans maybe traveling a little bit more in Latin America versus coming to the United States. We really saw no discernable difference between what the Europeans do and what people in Asia/Pacific do.
Adam Frisch (UBS):
What can we expect from G&A going forward?
Martina Hund-Mejean: We are very mindful between the top line growth and what we have to do on the G&A perspective.
Despite that, we have some pretty good leverage to moderate any kind of impact, be it what happens in terms of a tiering perspective from our customer agreements, be it that more than half of our revenue growth is actually generated out of the United States and from a G&A perspective, again, we are pretty much reiterating what we had said before.
And when you put the numbers together, you should see some pretty healthy margin expansion. But you already saw for the first six months as well as the remaining six months of the year.
Adam Frisch (UBS):
Is there anything else going on in your credit portfolio that would explain the growth there?
Martina Hund-Mejean: From everything that we can really see, this is what is happening in the market in the United States. We obviously still the moves of non-discretionary purchases to discretionary purchases, but we also do believe that the housing crisis and the restrictions in credit for consumers have an impact on the consumers utilizing their cards.
Adam Frisch (UBS):
What are your other plans for debit growth going forward?
Martina Hund-Mejean: We really have all options open. IPS is obviously a significant investment that we did over last year and the first part of this year. So that is our primary focus, to make sure that we get Security Service Federal Credit Union up and running and then focus the next customers in the pipeline.
Elizabeth W. Grausam (Goldman Sachs):
On SEPA, how should we think about that as possibly some offset in your processed transaction growth? 
