Announcer next, major credit card executives testified on excessive fees for card transactions. That is that Card Companies announce a fee hike to insert or tap credit and edit cards. This hearing runs two hours. Good morning. This hearing will come to order. American consumers today are rightly worried about inflation and rising prices for the goods they buy. Today were going to talk about a hidden fee that fuels the fires of inflation across america every day. What they may not know is this swipe fee is contributing to the problem of inflation. When swipe fees on credit and debit cards go up, as they recently did, it increases inflation. Consumers ultimately pay the price. Ironically, this journey for me started in this very room 16 years ago. Arlen specter was a chairman at the senate judiciary. He called the hearing on swipe and interchange fees. I attended because i was not familiar with those terms. I heard for the first time what a swipe fee was. The fact that, when i used my de
Good morning. This hearing will come to order. American consumers today are rightly worried about inflation and rising prices for the goods they buy. Today were going to talk about a hidden fee that fuels the fires of inflation across america every day. What they may not know is this swipe fee is contributing to the problem of inflation. When swipe fees on credit and debit cards go up, as they recently did, it increases inflation. Consumers ultimately pay the price. Ironically, this journey for me started in this very room 16 years ago. Arlen specter was a chairman at the senate judiciary. He called the hearing on swipe and interchange fees. I attended because i was not familiar with those terms. I heard for the first time what a swipe fee was. The fact that, when i used my debit and credit card, the swipe fee was being charged to the retailer that i was ultimately paying. And then, i learned there was virtually no negotiation of those fees. Retailers were at the mercy of the credit ca
Echolocation a facility in the city was pretty simple. That was pretty much a cost decision as well. The decision to build a brand new data center from the ground up versus leverage the services of a prefabricated colocation center, that is already outfitted with all the heating and airconditioning and cooling facility that we need power, electricity. After weighing the costs of such, it was an easy choice and the most costeffective choice to seek out the services of a co location site for the city and county primary data center. Our former datacenter we look at ways to properly renovate and upgrade the facility there. From a cost perspective, it was not a benefit to the city, and we did not think it was a very use of the citys taxpayers funds, so we felt that it was best to research a colocation facility in the city, and were very pleased with our decision to go that route. Because one, we did not have to we no longer had the responsibility of managing a facility. We could repurchase
Into other areas of the organization, teaching them a new skill set. We no longer had the burden, frankly, of a facility management. We no longer had to stress our resources in any of the facilitybased type of management responsibilities. So that was a clear economic choice for us. Our decision to go to an enterprise mail solution was there were certainly a long term cost associated with that. But our decision to go to microsoft Cloud Solution was based on several factors. One of which being availability, reliability, and performance of microsoft, the availability to have the actual email application hosted in the cloud, took that burden off of our staffing resources. We have limited resources in the city to manage our user base. The yearly staffing costs and staffing time and resources in managing the email application on side and on premise on site and on premise, and our staffing provisions due to city budget cuts and deficits and reductions in force each year, we were less able to
How important is it on the web site it has to work, and has to work in scale, and all that, but it is not very important, right . What is important is they are trying to deliver information that is personal to you. Lets take our favorite banking website. Go to the website. You have to log in, right . From that point on, all you see is a Transaction Processing system, right . It does not actually care who you are. It has no idea who you are. The Consumer Internet sees is 200 terabytes. That is all it is. Not very big. The challenge is how do you get it. How do you take that information . I hate shopping at home depot, okay . I do not really like going there. However, think about this scenario. What if three weeks ago, i bought tile, and two weeks ago, i bought a faucet, and last week, i bought a sink, and this week, i bought a vanity mirror . What am i doing . Probably remodeling my bathroom, right . By the way, they also could know that i have actually spent 10,000 over the past four m