How Mastercard is a W

Mastercard is the second largest payment processing company in the world after Visa. In May 2023, its market cap is over $360 billion. Despite Visa beating Mastercard in every aspect, it has failed to outpace Mastercard stock price and yearly growth.

To give you a little background on how companies like Mastercard, Visa work is they essentially take a slice of a transaction; think of every time you swipe your credit card, a portion of that goes to the credit card network aka Mastercard, Visa or the smaller ones like Amex.

Experts estimate that to be 30 cents for every $100. At a first glance, it may not seem much, but when you add up all the transactions conducted daily, it adds up to billions in revenue. Furthermore, one area where Mastercard is more prevalent than Visa is in Europe.

Mastercard has also been entering the business-to-business payment transactions space, for instance companies that authorize a certain spend limit for their employees travel expenses. Another segment of business that payment processing companies have is the amount of data collection about their customers. They know every transaction, where their customers tend to spend the most, identify customer segments and so on.

Accessibility take:

I like about Mastercard is commitment to accessibility in the United States, with the release of the first inclusive credit card for visually impaired customers, partnered with Citizens Financial Group.

Originally published at https://aatish.substack.com.