Liz Grausam (Goldman Sachs): A follow-up on revenue and the GDV trends which are certainly stronger than expected. Are cross-border transactions outperforming your own internal expectations and what do you think that''s driven by?

Chris McWilton: We are winning deals vis-a-vis our major competitors. The travel markets remain healthy, and geopolitical events, terrorist activities have slowed down on international travel. Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific are really driving a lot of the growth for the company and we are well positioned as a unified global company to take advantage of those trends.

Tim Willi (A. G. Edwards): It looks like transactions per card the year-over-year growth rate has dropped off pretty sharply. I assume a lot of that was due to the annulations of the Washington mutual conversion. What are you doing or continuing to do with issuers to drive increased usage for a card account?

Chris McWilton: You are seeing some discontinuity in the growth rates, because we are lapping the anniversary of that card conversion. At the cardholder level we are working with our financial institution customers to make sure that debit is a viable product for both the issuer and the customer. You are going to see transaction size come down with PayPass, so there would be some downward pressure on that but we are very well positioned in debit and continue to see good growth potential.
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Tien-Tsin Huang (J.P. Morgan): On the ad and marketing, given the loss of the World Cup sponsorship, do you expect to replace this marketing spend or is this a chance to moderate your ad and marketing spend overall?

Chris McWilton: We built our ad and marketing budget around the World Cup as a platform. Going forward we intend to leverage other sponsorship properties that we have or perhaps new sponsorship properties to replace the World Cup activity. We have other major sponsorship properties, whether it be UEFA Champions League or Copa, Major League Baseball here in the U.S.

Adam Frisch (UBS): With regard to European banks building their own separate compliance debit team, how are your discussions going with the European banks?

Chris McWilton: There were headlines around developing a European payment scheme. Our Maestro brand and our platform in Europe is ideal for solving the safer challenges. We have got about 300 million Maestro cards in circulation in Europe today. If selected banks decide to get together and create something from ground zero, there are obviously challenges with that.

Adam Frisch (UBS): Were there any major pricing changes which impacted revenue growths in the quarter?

Chris McWilton: We do have slight pricing modification around our stand-in fees. It was not significant to revenue growth in the quarter.

Ken Posner (Morgan Stanley): The revenue growth in the quarter was a lot stronger than modeled. What is your comment on the US, where the bill business growth was 10% lagging the rest of the world and the 10% growth was actually a down shift from 16% growth in the prior quarter year-over-year?

Chris McWilton: What you are seeing in the US is the lapping of the anniversary on the debit conversion that took place in 2006. It''s not related to any conscious effort to trim back advertising and marketing in the US. It is a slower growth market. Then you layer in the effect of the debit conversion and you are going to see the growth under 10%.

Ken Posner (Morgan Stanley): MasterCard is having a lot of fixed cost to the business model. Are you just in a period of time when there is going to be a need to spend more to grow more?

Chris McWilton: The fourth quarter is a period of the lowest profitability but we are not taking our assets from an expense standpoint. We are adding capabilities around product, we are adding abilities around advisory, capabilities, and adding people, and we are going to see that growth that we have experienced in the first half of the year continue through the second half.

David Hochstim (Bear Stearns): Is there any way to quantify the breakdown of the increase in dollar spend between personnel additions and the consulting and strategic initiatives?

Chris McWilton: That is broken out in the 10Q. The biggest bulk of the growth in G&A is on the personnel line.

David Hochstim (Bear Stearns): What’s your view of the 18-point down draft in the average revenue margin?

Chris McWilton: Some of that is moderated by international volumes, and when that volume is strong, we are able to generate higher margin in those types of transactions. Over a long-term horizon we expect gentle down draft on that, but as I caution literally year around quarter-to-quarter, it might bounce around a little.

Andrew Jeffrey (Robertson & Humphrey): Can you talk about market share in Europe or in the US?

Chris McWilton: We are not focused on share. We are focused on profitable share and delivering financial results. We are constantly looking for new deals, and, we are seeing a lot of deals coming through Europe.

Andrew Jeffrey (Robertson & Humphrey): Are there any portfolio conversions strongly in the pipeline?