Our Discover unit, already very in tune with their Cardmembers and their behavior, spent much of the past couple of years tailoring its offering and narrowing its focus to a more profitable customer segment. Today, we feel we are in a much better position to service these clients and use our Cashback Bonus® positioning to broaden the product solutions available to them. And Discover's more than 4 million merchant partners increasingly view Discover as the lowest cost, most flexible provider of card services.

Some of the changes we have made on behalf of our clients were not initiated from inside the firm but rather were the result of agreements we made as part of outside regulatory action. Issues related to the sale of mutual fund products by our retail brokers is one such area. Greater transparency is called for in the way we conduct this business and how clients pay us for the products we sell. As of this writing, we have agreed to a number of changes moving forward, including a Mutual Funds Bill of Rights, which stipulates the rights of mutual funds investors working with us. And, we plan to do more.

We have made important organizational changes in an effort to proactively identify and address other potential conflicts. Our new President, Steve Newhouse, has been charged with a single-minded focus on clients — coordinating and expanding all of our client-related activities across business units. In bringing Eric Dinallo to the firm from New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office, we established a valuable internal voice for clients. Eric's job will include working with each of the business units in their continuing effort to identify practices or perceptions that may be in conflict with the spirit of the regulatory law and address potential issues before they become problems. And in nominating the respected Howard Davies, former Chairman of the Financial Services Administration in the United Kingdom and currently head of the London School of Economics, to our Board of Directors, we will add an acknowledged leader in the area of risk management and regulation.

There will be some who say we were forced to make such a broad array of changes. In some cases, they will be correct. But the broader imperatives that we have undertaken on behalf of our clients were begun with a simple vision statement created more than four years ago, before many of the current issues arose. Clearly, the regulatory environment has become more intense. But we will work together with our regulators to find effective solutions. And, we hope, not just with our firm but across our industry, a healthier portrait of our efforts will emerge. I know that our commitment to clients — to their best interests and their ultimate success — is as unshakable as ever.

We believe our strategy of being client-driven is working. We have seen it in our market shares. We have seen it in our revenues. We have seen it in our client satisfaction numbers. We have seen it in the deals we are being awarded and the assets individual investors are entrusting to us. We have seen it in the efficiencies we have created. And we have seen it in our internal organization.