Vasant Prabhu : And other revenue was helped by mostly marketing services and consulting revenue, a fair amount of that linked to the FIFA World Cup. There was a lot of client-related marketing and spending related to the World Cup. Clients ask us to activate a variety of programs and that certainly helped the revenue.
Operator: Our next question comes from Will Nance with Goldman Sachs.
Will Nance : Wanted to kind of double click on some of the comments you made around China. It sounds like you guys are looking towards that region as being a fairly big driver of continued recovery in cross-border travel. I think we heard this morning from your competitor that those volumes in aggregate seem to only be something like 1% to 2% of overall cross-border volumes pre COVID. So was wondering, given how much of a focus this is for investors as a driver of continued strong growth, can you put some guardrails around how we should be thinking about the magnitude of impact of China once it’s fully reopened relative to kind of what we saw in the most recent quarter?
Al Kelly: Well, a couple of things. First, our numbers are fairly close to those of our competitor. We are — as Vasant said, we really think that, first, we’re going to see the travel outbound from China to Southeast Asia. I think it’s going to be still a bit of time before we’re going to see a Chinese traveler back in Europe at the level of pre pandemic or back in the United States at the level of pre-pandemic. And I think it’s going to — people are going to wait and see what’s happening with COVID within China. So Vasant talked about the fact that we’re not counting on any kind of recovery that inbound into China into the second half of the year. But my personal expectation is that we’ll see probably a spread of three to five quarters before, starting in the second half before China gets back to a level of pre pandemic or 2019.
So it is — for us, it’s — we have built our plan around pretty much what Vasant said in his remarks and what I just said. And if China comes back faster than we’re saying, then obviously, that will help us. If it comes back slower, it will have the opposite impact.
Vasant Prabhu : Yes. I mean, in terms of thinking about the impact, you all and we all have been tracking how is our cross-border recovering relative to pre-COVID levels and are we back on the trend line and so on, as you know? And we’ve told you now for a few quarters that many corridors, and I went through a lot of that, are well above the 2019 level. The three that were not and are still not, U.S. is approaching — U.S. inbound is approaching 2019 levels and was held back by the strong dollar, but Asia is still — and I went through the numbers, quite a bit below 2019 levels. Most of Asia is open, only China isn’t. So if Asia is going to get back to pre-COVID levels and back to the original trend line, that’s where the China impact is going to be visible. And then you expect and we expect that cross-border travel index to keep improving through the year. For that to happen, we obviously need China to come back. So it is important.
Operator: Our next question comes from Lisa Ellis with SVB MoffettNathanson.
Lisa Ellis : I had a question about the evolution of Visa Direct. You highlighted the plus 39% year-on-year growth ex Russia in the quarter. Over the last few years, you’ve been talking a lot with tap-to-pay and contactless about there being sort of this inflection point dynamic where you reach a certain level of critical mass and then growth really accelerates. Is this similar dynamic true for Visa Direct? And can you give us a sense for sort of how we should think about that evolve over the next couple of years?
