Overview

Mastercard Inc. (stylized as MasterCard from 1979 to 2016 and as mastercard since 2016) is an American multinational payment card services corporation headquartered in Purchase, New York. It provides payment transaction processing and other related-payment services, including travel-related payments and bookings). Its principal business globally is to process payments between the banks of merchants and the card-issuing banks or credit unions of purchasers who use its branded debit, credit and prepaid cards to make purchases. Mastercard has been publicly traded since 2006.

Mastercard (originally Interbank, then Master Charge) was created by an alliance of several banks and regional bankcard associations in response to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became Visa and remains its biggest competitor. Both companies have faced numerous antitrust lawsuits. Prior to its initial public offering, Mastercard Worldwide was a cooperative owned by the more than 25,000 financial institutions that issue its branded cards.

1958–1968: Founding

Although BankAmericard's debut in September 1958 was a failure, it began to turn a profit by May 1961. Bank of America kept this information secret and allowed widespread negative impressions to linger in order to ward off competition. This strategy was successful until 1966, when BankAmericard's profitability had become too big to hide. From 1960 to 1966, there were 10 new credit cards introduced in the United States, but from 1966 to 1968, approximately 440 credit cards were introduced by banks large and small throughout the country.

These newcomers promply banded together into regional bankcard associations.

At the time, sixteen states limited the ability of banks to operate through branch locations, and another fifteen states entirely prohibited branch banking and required unit banking. A unit bank can legally operate only at a single site, forcing it to remain very small. By joining a regional bankcard association, a unit bank could add a credit card to its financial products, and achieve economies of scale by outsourcing tedious back office tasks like card servicing to the association.

Such associations also enabled unit banks to aggregate their customer bases and merchant networks in order to make a credit card useful for both customers and merchants; early credit cards had failed because they could only be used within a small radius around their respective issuing banks.

In 1966, Karl H. Hinke, an executive vice president at Marine Midland Bank, asked representatives of several other banks to meet him in Buffalo, New York. Marine Midland had just launched its own regional bankcard in the Upstate New York market after Bank of America declined its request for a BankAmericard regional license because Marine Midland was too big. The result of the Buffalo meeting was that several banks and regional bankcard associations agreed to join forces as Interbankard, Inc., which then became the Interbank Card Association (ICA).

By the end of 1967, ICA had 150 members and Hinke became ICA's chairman. Bank of America eventually joined Mastercard as well.

1969–2005: International expansion

Also in 1969, First National City Bank joined Interbank and merged its proprietary Everything Card program with Master Charge.

In 1979, Master Charge: The Interbank Card was renamed MasterCard. Beginning in 1980, the company rolled out new cards with a refreshed logo. Cards retained the overlapping red and yellow circles first adopted in 1969; subsequent card designs have continued to use this motif. In July 1983 the company became the first card-issuer to use holograms as part of its credit card security, with Visa following along 6 months later. Mastercard acquired the Cirrus network of automated tellers in 1985.

In 2002, MasterCard International merged with Europay International, another large credit-card issuer association, of which Eurocard had become a part in 1992. Mastercard became a Delaware corporation in connection with the merger, as well as in anticipation of an IPO.

2006–2026: IPO, acquisitions, and further expansion

The company, which had been organized as a cooperative of banks, had an initial public offering on May 25, 2006, selling 95.5 million shares at $39 each. The stock is traded on the NYSE under the symbol MA, with a market capitalization of $434 billion as of April 2024. The deal was designed to maintain the value of the brand and minimise regulatory costs. In August 2010, Mastercard Worldwide, as it had been rebranded, expanded its e-commerce offering with the acquisition of DataCash, a UK-based payment processing and fraud/risk management provider.

In March 2012, Mastercard announced the expansion of its mobile contactless payments program, including markets across the Middle East.

In 2014, Mastercard acquired Australian rewards program manager company Pinpoint for an undisclosed amount. In July 2016, Mastercard acquired 92.4% of VocaLink, a British company, for $920 million. In August 2017, Mastercard acquired Brighterion, a company with intellectual property in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Brighterion holds several patents. In 2017, Mastercard introduced a program using biometric cards where a fingerprint sensor is embedded with the payment card's secure chip, enabling cardholder authentication directly on the card.

By 2025, Mastercard had extended its program to cards used by Eastern Bank in Bangladesh and Jordan Kuwait Bank in the Middle East.

In August 2019, Mastercard launched an offer to acquire part of the operations of Nets, a Scandinavian company, for €2.85 billion. In April 2021, Mastercard created a calculator that gathers information and measures the carbon footprints of customers to aid awareness of carbon emissions and global warming. The same month, Mastercard announced the acquisition of Ekata, a company specializing in identity verification, for $850 million. In March 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mastercard announced that it would suspend all business operations in Russia.

Finances

As of 2026, Mastercard ranked 141 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue.