Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Bryan Keane – Credit Suisse.
Bryan Keane – Credit Suisse
Just on the total accounts on file, it looked like it dropped, I think if I heard you right total accounts on file now is 355 million. It dropped about 18 million or so. Can you just talk about what’s going on in that number? Was that deconversions or is that just lower organic growth or churn in the portfolio?
Philip W. Tomlinson
Mainly it’s some kind of purging going on in the portfolio. It’s in the prepaid card areas mainly is what caused the decrease.
James B. Lipham
These prepaid cards come and go pretty quick. We’ve got a couple of plans that we have added millions and millions of cards and once that card is used up they don’t renew it. So, you’ll see more volatility in that area particularly as we get larger with prepaid. There’s been no deconversions, or if you recall I think last quarter we did have the Nordstrom’s gift card deconversion, they took that back in house.
Bryan Keane – Credit Suisse
Is there any idea or any way to know what the purging is going to look like going forward? Or, how much clean up there might be to your accounts on file?
James B. Lipham
I think most of the cleanup is pretty well done. We’ve got two or three clients who still have some what I would call inactive accounts, a lot of inactive accounts that they’ve kept on file. We do charge a fee for an inactive account. But, I think most of our clients have looked at that pretty hard.
Bryan Keane – Credit Suisse
Then just moving over to transaction volumes, I think it was 3.6% at least that was in North America, that’s down quite a bit. Can you just talk about volumes, did it fall off as the quarter ended here? And, I guess you’re assuming going forward in the guidance that that is going to get even lower?
James B. Lipham
We don’t it on a day-to-day basis yet. We probably will have some trends as time passes by. I don’t know that we see if falling off a lot more than that. We were pleasantly surprised that it held up as strong as it has. Although, you know, we keep hearing all the grim predictions that you read about, about this holiday season but we’re feeling pretty good about where we’re headed in to the holiday season and that’s why we reaffirmed that guidance.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
