Mastercard at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Mastercard (NYSE:MA) presented at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. CFO Sachin Mehra discussed the company’s robust first-quarter performance and strategic initiatives amid a challenging macroeconomic landscape. While acknowledging potential market moderation, Mehra highlighted Mastercard’s resilience and growth prospects.

Key Takeaways

• Mastercard reported a strong Q1 performance, driven by consumer spending and stable cross-border trends.
• Strategic investments in areas like agentic commerce and tokenization are central to Mastercard’s growth.
• The company is focusing on mergers and acquisitions that align with its strategic goals.
• Mastercard is preparing for the evolving payment landscape, including stablecoins.
• The company aims to expand its services portfolio, leveraging secular tailwinds for growth.

Financial Results

• Q1 results exceeded expectations, with significant contributions from FX volatility and reduced rebates and incentives.
• Cross-border volumes rose by approximately 16% year-to-date through April 28, measured in local currency.
• Network-linked services and solutions account for about 60% of value-added revenue, with 85% being recurring.
• Full-year guidance includes the anticipated roll-off of the Capital One debit book.

Operational Updates

• Consumer spending remains robust, even after adjusting for the leap year and holiday timing effects.
• Record low unemployment and wage growth surpassing inflation are observed in most markets.
• Cross-border travel spending showed slight moderation in the Middle East and Africa.
• New portfolio wins, such as Citizens and Wells Fargo, are impacting Mastercard’s operations.
• Tokenization is a significant focus, with 35% of Mastercard’s switched transactions now tokenized, leading to a 3% to 6% increase in merchant approval rates.

Future Outlook

• Mastercard plans to deepen penetration of existing solutions, attract new customers, and expand its addressable market.
• The company is committed to staying ahead in evolving technologies, including stablecoins.
• Growth is expected through its services portfolio, creating a positive cycle for the company.
• Strategic acquisitions will focus on large, fast-growing markets.

Q&A Highlights

• Mastercard’s network is now available for stablecoin settlements.
• Increasing stablecoin usage is noted for crypto-related transactions.
• The company is expanding its services portfolio based on customer feedback.
• High-growth areas like cross-border payments and cybersecurity are key focus areas.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a comprehensive understanding of Mastercard’s strategic positioning and future plans.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Alright. Great. Thanks everyone for joining. My name is Tien Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector and and super excited to have Mastercard back with us.

With us from Mastercard, have Sachin Mehra, the CFO. I was just saying Sachin time moves. I remember when he started was 02/2019 as CFO after Right. Joining Mastercard in 02/2010. I I interacted with Sachin a lot around b to b and and corporate payments and and learned a ton from him.

And I gotta say he’s also a a UVA MBA grad, so so go Hoos on that, Sachin. But great to see you, your warrior for being here. Hope you’re good from a health perspective.

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: I’m great. Thanks, Ninjin. Thank you for having me here.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: No. Of course. So we’ll go through a few questions that we’ve gathered from the audience, if that’s okay. And if there’s time, we’ll take questions at the end. So, again, but thank you for for being here.

It means a lot to me. So let’s kick it off with the obligatory macro questions and give us a sense of what you’re seeing on the ground with respect to consumer spending and the macro. I know there’s a lot of leading indicators that investors ask us about, so I’d love to hear from you what you track and what you’re doing. If you see something change, how can the firm pivot to meet the financial targets that you’ve set?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Okay, great. Well, good morning everyone. And again, Tien Tsin, thank you for having me here. Look, mean, from a macro standpoint, again, we’ve just come out of the earnings cycle and I’m sure some of you have had the chance to actually listen into what we shared there. Here’s what I would say.

I would say that there’s the fact and then there’s the sentiment. And the sentiment, which we call soft data, slightly different than what the facts are. And you saw we had a solid first quarter that was on the back of strong consumer spending. So the consumer continues to be healthy as we see it. And we’ve seen the data through like we shared at our earnings call through the first quarter and then through the April, which is what we shared at our earnings call, strong consumer.

And again, when I look at spending trends, we kind of look at them sequentially to see how trends are actually shaping up. And sequentially, when you adjust for the fact that we had the leap year effect again, I’m looking at growth rates here. When you adjust for the leap year effect for the timing of holidays and of Easter as well as some pull forward in spend which took place into Q4 of last year, trends are stable. So consumer continues to be healthy. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing from an overall standpoint.

And again, different geographies, different things and then different subsets of the consumer, we can talk about more specifically if you have an interest around that. But broadly, I would say the consumer is showing healthy spending trends. As it relates to leading indicators, there are a few things which we track. Number one is unemployment levels And unemployment levels are at record lows. They continue to be at record lows.

You’re seeing the data. We’re seeing the data. And part of the reason this is important is and this is common knowledge, but when people have jobs, they get paychecks. When people get paychecks, they tend to spend money. And that’s really important.

So that’s one we keep a close eye on. The other thing which we look at is what is the rate of wage growth relative to the rate of inflation. And in the vast majority of markets as we look across the globe, the rate of wage growth is exceeding that of inflation. And so effectively, the spending power of the consumer is still very much intact. So these are two important indicators.

There are several other indicators which we’d look at, things like the wealth effect, etcetera, etcetera. By and large, I would say these are the things which we’re tracking. And right now, they look like they’re in in pretty good shape.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: All right. Good. So let let’s do cross border since you mentioned it, high yielding product and solution for for Mastercard. I know it’s been very volatile coming into the year. Investors are tracking airline activity and all that good stuff.

So what are you seeing on the ground on cross border?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yes. So I think, again, remember Mastercard, global company, diversified. We’ve got the benefits of diversification. So when you hear about data as it relates to travel related spend and you hear about it in the context of domestic spend versus cross border, you’re hearing about it in the context of specific companies. In the instance of Mastercard, what you’re seeing is the following in terms of cross border.

Overall cross border spending trends remain stable. There is one call out which we had as it relates to cross border travel. And again, all of this is in the context of the first quarter data as well as the April. We saw a little bit of moderation take place in cross border travel spend in select markets in The Middle East and Africa. And we bring this out.

And oftentimes people will ask why are you calling that out? The reason we bring this out is to actually just make sure that we can make sense of the data that we share with you because you’re going to see trends in the data when you adjust for the anomalies, I talked about earlier like leap year and the pull forward of spin. There is generally stable trends from a cross border spending standpoint. I mean the fact is year to date through April 28, our cross border volumes grew at approximately 16% on a local currency basis. So still very healthy spending trends there.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Good. Sorry, we just talked about the consumer. So let’s go through just for the sake of going through it the rest of the year on the 25% guide. I know there’s a lot of different puts and takes. You have pricing.

You’ve got the lapping of some new deals. You have FX volatility, which is suddenly a very popular subject in payments. Walk us through that.

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Okay. Let’s start with the first quarter because I think that kind of sets the groundwork for the full year. Our first quarter performance came in slightly ahead of our expectations, primarily driven by two factors. Number one is FX volatility was higher than what we anticipated when we put our first quarter guidance out in the first place. And number two, the rebates and incentives we had were lower than what we had originally expected.

As it relates to FX volatility, as I kind of do the look forward on this, super hard to predict. I would tell you coming into the year into the second quarter and the first couple of weeks of April, FX volatility levels were higher and then they started to taper off. So again, this thing will move around, super hard to predict. We do our best estimates as to where we think FX volatility will be when we provide you guidance for the year. As it relates to rebates and incentives, which is going to be an impactful fact as you go through the year, the slightly lower rebates and incentives and from my perspective is more a timing issue.

So I said differently, we had lower rebates and incentives in the first quarter. We expect that based on the deal pipelines we’re seeing that that will catch up as the year kind of goes on. So really, I kind of think about that more as a cadence thing. A few other points to note as you think about the year going forward. Number one, Mastercard has had several wins in terms of new portfolios coming on through the course of last year.

We won our the Citizens portfolio last year. That started to convert. It started in the tail end of Q1 of last year. It really started to ramp up in Q2. And then we had the Wells Fargo win, which took place also, and the conversion of that happened in Q2 of last year.

So you’re going to see the lapping effects of that come through from a growth standpoint. The good news is we’ll take those wins every day. We love the fact that we’ve got new volume coming into the system. We’ve got new customers. We’ve got new the ability to sell more in the nature of services as well as enhance the growth of their portfolios.

But from a growth rate standpoint, you do have the math which plays its part in terms of lapping. So there’s the lapping of select portfolios which is going to take place as the year progresses. The second thing I’d say is there were certain things which we had rolled out from a product capability standpoint last year for which we priced. And you’re going to have the lapping of that pricing happen as the year progresses as well. So those would be the big things I would call out as you think about what is factored into our full year guidance.

The last point I’d make is, and I’ve been asked this question before, as it relates to what is it that we’ve assumed on the Capital One debit book? And I’ll mention that, as I mentioned in the earnings call, we have put in our best estimate as to what we think the roll off of the debit book will be from Capital One. Capital One has been a very good partner for Mastercard and continues to be a very good partner for Mastercard. We expect that we will continue to do a ton of business with them, primarily on the credit side and the services side of the business. They’ve also been very clear that they will migrate the debit book, which is what we built into our outlook for the year the best we can.

Again, timing of this is TBD only because as they go through the completion of the acquisition and start the conversion schedules, we’ll know a little bit more. But suffice it to say as we learn more, we’ll share that with you as well.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Okay, good. So have won, Mastercard has won a lot of business over the last few years. You mentioned Capital One Discover as a portfolio that’s up in the air. I think there’s some news flow around the Apple Card as well, Sachin. So just just to go a little bit deeper, what differentiates Mastercard enough for you to retain those businesses when there are decisions that are being made like Capital One Discover, like perhaps Apple Card that’s going to change hands from the bank side?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yes. I mean the short answer Tien Tsin on that is just strong engagement with the customer. And then you bring your suite of solutions, services, etcetera, etcetera. But if you don’t engage and you don’t understand on a consistent basis what are the objectives that our customer is trying to achieve, it’s really hard to serve them. It’s very easy for us as a company to get actually put into a box and just be a supplier and them treating us like a vendor.

That’s the last thing we need to do. Our approach as a company has been very much around solution selling, which is trying to truly understand what is it that our customer needs, what are their objectives, how can we help them grow their top line, how can we help them control their cost base. And then we bring our solutions to bear to make that come to life. And the solutions could be everything from our digital technologies which we’ve got to our services capabilities around safety and security products to our consumer acquisition engagement capabilities, again part of our services portfolio. So there’s a whole suite of services.

But no one kind of solution is necessarily true for every win which takes place. So it’s about early engagement, constant engagement, putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, driving towards helping them grow their top line and reduce their cost base, all while being competitive in the marketplace.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Got it. That’s helpful. So Sachin, let’s talk about another type of deal. So you did announce a strategic investment in partnership with CorePay. I know you and I have talked about corporate payments and B2B a bunch in your prior role here at Mastercard.

Why do the minority investment, what does it bring to you on the cross border in the commercial payment side? Sure.

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: So Corpy has been an important partner for Mastercard for more than a decade, actually much more than a decade. And we’ve been doing a bunch of business with Core Pay on the virtual card side. I mean they’ve been exclusively Mastercard branded and virtual card. So when I step back and I think about the nature of the relationship, it actually ties back Tien Tsin to your prior question. Understanding what exactly your customer needs and at the same time recognizing what your strategy is and how you can actually fill certain gaps in what might be there in Mastercard’s portfolio as part of how we go about doing things.

So in the instance of Core Pay, our minority investment is in the cross border business. So let’s just be clear. It’s not at the parent company level. It’s at the cross border payments business of theirs. But as part of this, there is one, an extension of our existing virtual card agreement with Core Pay, super important.

So that’s kind of point number one. But when we think about what Core Pay brings in its cross border services, they’ve got the capability to do large ticket account to account cross border payments. And they service primarily corporate clients. Yes, they’ve got some bit of capabilities where they’re serving some of the smaller banks and financial institutions with their solution. And they’re primarily U.

S. Focused. Now when you think about what Mastercard brings, what Mastercard brings is a small ticket capability in cross border account to card payments. So they’ve got large ticket, we’ve got small ticket, we’ve got the global presence, and we’ve got access to the FI channel. So this is very complementary.

When you step back and you think about our ability both as Mastercard and as Corpay to be able to serve our client base, this is the best way to go about doing it, is to partner with someone who’s got an excellent capability in terms of not only currency conversion, currency management, but also in terms of basic technology and platform and reach to work with them to actually meet the need for Mastercard on the large ticket side. Simultaneously, what we’re doing is we’re taking our Mastercard move capabilities and making it available to Corpay to provide their corporate client base. So this is very synergistic for both companies in many ways. And as we went into that discussion, we said there’s a ton of stuff we do on the virtual card side. There’s more we can do on this cross border account to account payment side.

Let’s bring ourselves together to try and think about this more strategically as we approach our customer base, where we can give Core Pay a broader customer base. They can give us a capability in the nature of large ticket payments. And it’s synergistic from that perspective. So it made a lot of sense for both companies.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Yes. No, I didn’t appreciate how complimentary it was on the large versus small ticket front. No, because cross border is hard. I think you’ve talked about that and b to b is tough. So no.

It’d be fun to see how that how that comes together. So let’s let’s spin it forward. Talk a little bit about tech. I know agentic commerce is a big subject. I tuned into Stripe sessions.

There was a lot of discussion about that there. Sachin, you guys recently announced Mastercard agent pay. So what’s the pitch on agent pay from Mastercard? What’s what’s different about it? And and what’s how does it fit into your overall AI strategy?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yeah. Look, this is really exciting. As far as I’m concerned, as we see what’s going on in the world of AI and then how that’s translating into the world of commerce, we think Mastercard agent pay is going to be a key enabler of this. So let’s step back and really think about what’s been going on from a generative AI standpoint. We’re all familiar with the fact that Gen AI is being used to enable search and has been used to enable search.

Those companies who are doing search are now enabling commerce as the next extension of doing search. So it’s not only about finding what you’re looking for but it’s about closing the sale thereafter. To close the sale, there’s one thing which needs to get done which is a payment needs to be made. And Mastercard needs to be at that inflection point where that commerce transaction ultimately needs to be completed. And that’s what Mastercard’s agent pay solution is all about.

And really what it is, is bringing our tokenization capabilities to be able to authenticate and register when a commerce transaction is done by an agent. The simplest way to think about this is the following, which is when you and I do a search today, if we’re not utilizing an agent, is we’ll do the search, we’ll identify a product, we’ll go into the website, we’ll click buy, we’ll enter our credentials, our payment credentials and we’ll close the transaction, the goods will be shipped to you. The world going forward could very well be in a situation where instead of you and I actually closing that transaction, an agent is authorized by the individual, by the human being to close that commerce transaction. But for an agent to be authorized to do it in a safe and secure manner, you need a Mastercard at that point with the tokenization capability, with our franchise rules, with our safety and security products, with an acceptance network to allow for that transaction to close. And that’s what Mastercard Agent Pay is in the simplest way possible.

And that’s the only way I know how to explain it, which is in the simplest way possible because if you ask me the technical parts of this, I’m going to get the product guy in front of you. But that’s the way I understand it. And I think it’s important because the best analogy I can think about is the following. Let’s go back a decade ago. When the likes of Uber, Uber Eats, Lyft, etcetera, were coming around, they were in the business of enabling mobility.

They were in the business of enabling commerce or whatever, meeting the needs from an Uber Eats standpoint. They needed to actually have the way to close the commerce transaction in that instance, which was the payment vehicle of choice. The payment vehicle of choice, we were at the inflection point. We made our capabilities available as a network to allow for that transaction to close when the likes of Uber needed that capability. So if you believe that going forward commerce will get done by agents, we need to be there.

And that’s what we’re doing here through Mastercard AgentPay. Our job is not to pick winners and losers. Our job is to be available for any new emerging technology which is going to present itself in the nature of a commerce opportunity to allow for us to be the network of choice to drive

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: that capability. Yes. No, that’s good. That’s a good summary. I think I’ve definitely appreciated how difficult it is to close the transaction and all the rules you mentioned from an agent perspective.

But it sounds like a lot of this stands on the technology of tokens. And tokenization, I think, is a big theme for the networks for payments in in general. I we’ve been calling out as one of the biggest probably breakthroughs to to drive to drive growth. So tell us where we are with tokenization, how penetrated is it today across your your processing book and and where do you see it going and what’s the monetization potential for Meschar? Because there’s clearly benefits from better authorization rates and lower fraud and now empowering AgenTek Commerce.

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yes, look, mean tokenization is certainly one aspect of AgenTek Commerce. We’ve talked about the various other capabilities which come along with AgenTek Commerce. But I think your question is more specific to what’s the runway which is there on tokenization, what are the benefits around that. And here’s what I tell you. I’d say, first of all, what does tokenization do?

It provides for a much safer and secure checkout experience. So the idea is how can we do this in a more seamless manner with less friction and with less fraud. Roughly 35% of all of Mastercard’s switched transactions today are tokenized transactions. We’ve seen exponential growth on that. And growth doesn’t happen because Mastercard wills it to happen.

Growth happens because people see value in that. And the value they see is exactly what I’m saying, frictionless commerce, safety and security. The other thing they see is improvement in their performance. So we have seen when merchants tokenize, for example, anywhere between a 3% to 6% increase in approval rates. An increase in approval rates means you were taking out that friction point which normally exists when you and I as a consumer go to checkout and my transactions decline.

Merchants don’t want friction because you tend to lose a consumer when friction takes place. So tokenization is incredibly powerful for that. So roughly 35% of our transactions, switch transactions globally are tokenized. We not only provide tokenization, we provide token services as well. And the services is what we charge for.

And these are things like authentication, this is like lifecycle management, it’s like cryptogram validation, that’s a tongue twister. But there are capabilities that we provide as part of tokenization, which are very valued and we charge for that. When you deliver value, you can charge for it. And we have been charging for it. There’s a lot of runway which still remains.

The reality is this will happen and as adoption increases, you’ll have the opportunity to not only charge for existing services, but you’ll have the opportunity to deliver additional services which you can charge for. Again, it’s about being in the flow, enabling the tokenization to take place, delivering services on it and then charging for the same.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Good. So tokens, that’s a good summary there, Sachin. So tokens fit within, I think, the broader services category, which has been growing very, very fast for Mastercard. And I still get a lot of questions around the composition of services and what builds up to that growth that you’ve been putting up. Can you just walk us through that for those that are less familiar?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Okay, sure. So look, I mean, you’ve seen our financial statements and you see we break out payment network and value added services and solutions. So I’m going to talk about the value added services and solutions component of it. There are several categories of capabilities with certain value added services and solutions. So let’s go through each one of them.

Number one and this is in no particular order, but I’m going kind of just list them out for you first and then we’ll talk about each one of them. First is what we call our security products. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. Basically, how do we help our customers, whether they’re issuers, acquirers or even the end merchants, reduce the amount of fraud that might be taking place? How do we help them prevent cyber instances, so on and so forth?

That sits in the security products capability. Huge TAM, fast growing TAM, and something which we’ve been actually building capabilities both organically as well as doing acquisitions in this space. So that’s point number one. The next capability which sits in value added services and solutions is what we call consumer acquisition and engagement. It’s exactly what it sounds like, helping our customers acquire consumers who is what they care for and engage those consumers.

And this is everything from our loyalty capabilities to our marketing services. We’ve got personalization capabilities to the acquisition of a company called Dynamic Yield, is doing incredibly well. So you’ve got that sitting in that bucket. The next bucket over is what we call our business insights capabilities. This is the analytics and the insights we provide our customers to help them grow their portfolios.

Remember I talked about how we can help our customers grow their top line? This is a key enabler of that. This is our consulting capabilities. These are things we do from a data analytics and insights standpoint, which we can share with our customers to help them be even more efficient in terms of their growth of their portfolios. Then we’ve got gateway and issuer processing capabilities.

That’s the next capability. And then we’ve got a capability set which we call other solutions, which includes everything from our real time payment assets to our cross border account to account services capabilities to our open banking capabilities, all of that kind of sits in there. So there is a pretty wide variety of capabilities which sits in value added services and solutions. I think it’s important not to actually get hung up on what is the number of products or what are the kinds of products, but what is the philosophy that Mastercard adopts when it goes after these capabilities. And I’ve oftentimes been asked the question, when you do services, are they always going to be tied to your payment rails?

The short answer is we’d like for a tie in to the payment rails, but that is not an imperative. What is an imperative is to be able to solve for pain points of our customers. So you will see we recently acquired a company called Recorded Future. And I can talk a little bit more about Recorded Future if you want. But the reality is what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to solve for pain points which our customers are expressing to us when we engage with them.

It goes back to your original question, Tien Tsin, which is how do you win portfolios? You win portfolios by listening to what your customer needs. And our services portfolio has basically grown by virtue of that. Now, that doesn’t mean everything my customer needs, I’m going supply to them. What that means is if it makes sense for us, if we can scale it, if it’s a big addressable market and if it’s fast growing and we can deliver on that, it’s going to be hugely beneficial.

What we shared with you at Investor Day was a couple of data points which might be instructive to think about how the growth of our value added services solutions is actually triggered. One, approximately 60% of our value added services solutions revenue is what we call network linked. So if you’re a believer that there’s inherent growth in our payment network which is going to happen, you’re going to see the growth take place on the value added services solutions as well to the extent there’s about 60% of that which is network linked. The second data point we shared with you is that approximately 85% of our value added services solutions revenues are sorry, I’ve got a little problem with my eye here. But 85% is based on recurring revenue.

And recurring revenue is, again, important because people say, how do we know this is sustainable revenue growth which is going to take place? So these were important data points for us to share with you. We’re very excited about not only our existing set of capabilities but what the opportunity set ahead is to continue to penetrate. Growth in this area is going be delivered not only by the underlying trends of growth in the payment network but also by deepening penetration of our existing solutions across our existing customer base, tapping into new customers and then growing our addressable market by getting to new services.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Good. You covered a lot in the short period. You did mention recorded feature. Have to ask you about that. I think on the security software side, that was a well respected asset, I think within threat intelligence.

So pretty large acquisition on a relative basis. Why is it important to own that asset, Sachin? And how does it fit for for Mastercard?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Look, it’s important because the world is just going increasingly digital. And as the world goes digital, crime tends to go where the world is going. And if the world’s going more digital, that’s where crime and cybercrime is going to go. What Recorded Future is, is it is the largest threat intelligence company in the world. It has north of 1,900 customers and operates in about 75 countries globally.

We love the asset. It’s got a capability set. And it’s interesting, the customer base is a very diverse customer base. It’s certainly corporates, but there are lots of governments who use it. They see a lot of value.

So what does threat intelligence mean? What these guys do is they leverage their AI capabilities, their deep data, which they’ve got, by virtue of having tremendous access across all sorts of data, which is out in the public domain, by the way. This is across the internet, in the dark web, etcetera, etcetera. But it’s one thing to have everybody’s got access to that data. The question really is what do you do

And this is where Recorded Future is really good, which is they’ve built the capability to be able to mine that data to provide real time insights on when an impending cyber attack might take place. And customers care deeply about that. So it’s about sharing with our customers, whether they’re issuing institutions, acquiring institutions, corporations, doesn’t matter who you are, you’re vulnerable, you’re going to have some sort of cyber potential threat which is taking place. You want to hear about that quickly, you want to hear about that early, and you want to be told what you can do to actually fix it. And that’s what Recorded Future does and does really well.

Why does it make sense for Mastercard? It makes sense for Mastercard because when you bring the power of what they do with their technology and their access to data along with Mastercard’s data, it makes the model that much more efficient. So you bring the power of the data of what we can bring and they can bring along with their technology, you can make this a much more powerful product. We bring a distribution channel, which is incredibly powerful as part of this, and we’re very excited about it. Look, we closed the acquisition at the December, so we’re about four months into the acquisition.

Things are going well. The integration is actually progressing very much to plan. So we remain very excited about what the potential of this company is.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: All right. Good. No. I’ve heard they’ve they’ve picked up on some incredible signals and predicted some pretty wild things. So I’m I’m glad you guys guys own that.

So we talked about core pay. You made a minority investment in that. We just talked about recorded future. I would imagine Saatchen MasterCard gets so many looks at things to buy or invest in. So how do you prioritize that?

Has that changed at all? What is your appetite for doing deals? And I would imagine not doing a lot of auctions, there’s probably a lot of source sole source stuff. So just walk us through that quickly.

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yes, look, I mean M and A has been a and I put M and A into the big bucket of straight up full acquisitions, minority investments, call it what you want, right? I mean it’s been a core part of how we have actually looked at growth in our business. And it all starts though with the strategy. People oftentimes come and ask me the question, well, things must be cheap right now, why don’t you buy them? The answer is, look, we’re not looking to buy stuff because it’s cheap.

We’re looking to buy stuff because we can buy it at fair value. Sure, I’d like to get it cheap, buy it at fair value. But the real question is can you buy it, scale it and drive exponential growth beyond what that company today represents? That is what we’re interested in doing. So it starts with strategy.

We look at whether to meet our strategy we need to build, buy or partner. To the extent we’re going to build, that’s going to happen organically. To the extent we’re going to buy or partner, that’s going to happen through acquisitions. That’s been our philosophy historically. That will be our philosophy going forward.

From a focus area standpoint, it’s the same principles. It’s about can we buy the company and drive revenue synergies because really it’s all about driving growth to the top line. Number two, is it a big enough addressable market for Mastercard to be involved in? And is it a fast growing addressable market? Because call it what you want.

We might come across as saying we’re super brilliant and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of good stuff. The reality is, yeah, you can be really, really good. But what you also need is to be in the right space which has got good secular tailwinds and that’s what we’re looking to do, which is why you can see in our services portfolio the things we’ve gone after are large addressable markets with fast growth potential to them.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Yeah. No, we pay attention to what you buy because we learn a lot from it. So we’re five minutes left. I have like three or four questions left. I noticed we had a bunch of questions on stablecoins.

I’ll pick that and then we’ll we’ll close it out with one more. So stablecoins, how should I ask it? Friend or foe? Stablecoins, when you think about stablecoins, is it friend or foe for Mastercard?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Look, I mean, it’s as far as we’re concerned, stablecoins are an important evolution and they will continue to be something we’ll be involved in. We’ve been involved in stablecoins for some time now. The question really is, I think it’s really important to understand what the philosophy of Mastercard is. Again, we don’t pick winners and losers. We want to just be present with whatever is coming in the nature of evolving technologies and evolving capabilities.

And stablecoins is nothing other than one more of those. So as I think about stablecoins, I think about the following, which is stablecoins today have been rapidly growing. They’ve been growing in a space which has been primarily towards the use of stablecoins to enable crypto related purchases and sales. However, as they start to proliferate into an environment where people want to actually get settled up in stablecoins, we have made our network available for that. So our network is enabled to settle in stablecoins.

So if an acquirer chooses to get stablecoins as a settlement mechanism, not a problem. If really peel back the onion, what does a stablecoin do? And how is it different from the US dollar? It is ultimately backed by the U. S.

Dollar to the extent you’re talking about USDC or it doesn’t matter which stablecoin you’re talking about, right? There’s a fiat currency that sits behind it. We enable the settlement of numerous currencies on our network today. I kind of think about this as one more capability which will be enabled for settlement over our network. We act as the on ramp.

We act as the off ramp. So we enable people to actually get into Stablecoins using our card products. We enable people to actually use their Stablecoins when they choose to use their Stablecoins. And if they want to get a purchase done at a merchant who doesn’t want to accept stablecoins, we’ll act as the off ramp by enabling our card products to be available there. So look, there’s a lot of opportunity here.

There’s opportunity in the payment stream. There’s opportunity on the services side of this, all of which we’re very engaged with.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Good. We’re just about out of time, Sachin. It’s so great to have you here in person. So I always wish we had more time, but we’ve covered a lot. We talked about technology and services and tokens and of course the macro.

But just you talk to investors a lot, Sachin, and and different analysts. You know, what what do you think is not discussed enough, or do you have any closing sort of messages here without getting lost in all this detail that we just went through?

Sachin Mehra, CFO, Mastercard: Yeah. Look. I mean, the the one thing which is very clear is the world continues to be a very volatile place. The way I kind of like to think about it is there are things which we control and there are things we don’t control. The things we don’t control, we can’t worry about.

The things we control, we should be actually heads down executing on. And Mastercard as a company happens to be we’ve explained what our strategy is. We think that strategy is largely being driven by strong fundamentals. We’re executing on the various pillars of our strategy. There are strong secular tailwinds.

We’re winning share. We’re growing in new and emerging spaces like commercial and new payment flows and that services portfolio provides that virtuous cycle which we need to actually help drive the overall mandate for the company. So I think it’s well understood Tien Tsin. I wouldn’t say it’s not well understood, But I think what’s important is in volatile environments, companies like Mastercard, right, have got various pillars, which go well beyond the macro and that’s something to keep in mind.

Tien Tsin Huang, Analyst: Yes. No, it’s important. Don’t want to get caught up in the day to day on the macro side. Sachin, thank you so much for being Thank you so much.

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