Mastercard at KBW Fintech Payments Conference: Strategic Insights and Future Plans

On Wednesday, 12 November 2025, Mastercard (NYSE:MA) presented at the KBW Fintech Payments Conference 2025, providing a comprehensive overview of its strategic priorities and operational updates. CEO Michael Miebach highlighted Mastercard’s robust positioning in the evolving payment landscape, emphasizing both opportunities and challenges. While the company remains optimistic about consumer spending and technological advancements, it also acknowledges the need to navigate macroeconomic uncertainties.

Key Takeaways

• Mastercard is leveraging AI to enhance fraud detection, significantly impacting bank profitability.
• The company is actively investing in stablecoins, supported by recent regulatory clarity.
• Strategic focus remains on consumer payments, commercial payments, and value-added services.
• Mastercard is expanding its market share in regions with low digital payment penetration, such as Mexico.
• The Honor All Cards Rule remains a cornerstone of Mastercard’s competitive strategy.

Financial Results

• Spending Trends:

- October saw solid spending across consumer and business categories.

- Global spending remains steady, diversified, and resilient.

• AI Impact:

- A 200% increase in fraud detection through AI integration has significantly benefited bank profits.

• Service Growth:

- Value-added services grew 22% in the last quarter, surpassing projections.

Operational Updates

• Settlement:

- Reached a settlement in the rules class for US merchants, preserving the Honor All Cards Rule.

• AI Implementation:

- One-third of Mastercard’s services are AI-powered, with increasing internal use of Generative AI.

• Agent Pay:

- First agentic transaction completed; expansion plans include all US partners by year-end.

• Stablecoins:

- Enabled network settlements in stablecoins following the passing of the Genius Act.

• Commercial Payments:

- Notable momentum in commercial payments, with a 10% increase in SME card issuance.

• Mastercard Commerce Media:

- Launched in partnership with major companies including Citi and Microsoft.

• Mastercard Threat Intelligence:

- Developed by integrating payments data with Recorded Future’s threat information.

Future Outlook

• Agentic Commerce:

- Offers opportunities in cybersecurity and payment network services.

• Stablecoins:

- Interoperability and security solutions are expected to drive market growth.

• Consumer Payments:

- Focus on expanding digital payment penetration, particularly in Mexico.

• Commercial Payments:

- Small business opportunities are expanding across markets.

• Value-Added Services:

- Continued development of a differentiated service portfolio.

Q&A Highlights

• Competitive Positioning:

- The Honor All Cards Rule is crucial for predictable merchant experiences.

• Macro Environment:

- Consumer spending remains strong due to a stable labor market and wage growth.

• Commercial Payments Challenges:

- Progress in invoice payments is slow, but alignment with ERP systems offers optimism.

• Acquisition Strategy:

- Decisions are driven by strategic fit, talent acquisition, and speed to market.

In conclusion, Mastercard’s strategic initiatives and operational advancements underscore its commitment to innovation and market expansion. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - KBW Fintech Payments Conference 2025:

Sanjay: Going to get started here. Please join me in welcoming Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard. Michael’s been with Mastercard for over 15 years. He took the helm of CEO in 2021. He’s played a key role in transforming Mastercard into what it is today. Thank you, Michael, for spending some time with us. Really appreciate it.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Sanjay, thank you for having me. I was looking forward to this. We can talk about settlements and things like that.

Sanjay: Yeah. So let’s just kick it off right there. Maybe you could give us a sense of the settlement and how Mastercard sees it.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. So you know at the headline, we’re happy that we’ve reached a settlement in the rules class for the U.S. merchants after intense engagement after the first settlement was not approved by the judge. I think the settlement represents a good balance between acknowledging what the judge was looking for and the points that were made, and then balancing the interests between the different parties. This is a thought-through, balanced option that brings some certainty on interchange levels to the merchants, some more choice on what cards to accept and whatnot. Most importantly, it preserves the honor all cards rule, which is at the core of the user experience that, in the end, I would argue most merchants anyway are looking for. Right now, confident, but it’s still true. It needs an approval from a judge, and that hasn’t happened yet.

We’ll have to wait and see where that lands. But so far, so good.

Sanjay: Great. As we think about your competitive positioning, given the changes to the Honor All Cards Rule, do you think it still holds?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: I’m sorry, just.

Sanjay: Just the competitive positioning of the cards, because they will have more options. Merchants will have more options to steer away.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Yeah. You know, it holds for a number of reasons. First of all, the way that the agreement was reached is to say, honor all cards on a level of issuer basis, that will not be a choice. But you can say you’re going to take premium cards or not. You think about, if you’re a merchant, what are you trying to do? You’re trying to sell. When you think about the proportional level of sales that are related to premium cards, we’ve seen this in Europe. This really did not play out because the merchant wants that customer in their shop and have a predictable experience. You do not go on and off or left and right. I think the balance struck about standard cards, premium cards, and commercial cards is just very sensible so that the overall user experience will hold.

I think overall, that makes a lot of sense. The overall acceptance level is there. That beats any other alternative payments. The protections are there. The cybersecurity, all these other things that are built into the cards ecosystem, in particular, zero liability. When you take the category of cards overall versus other alternatives, that anyway holds.

Sanjay: Got it. Perfect. Maybe we could shift gears, talk about the macro. Obviously, it’s a very fluid situation in the macro environment. There are so many things coming at the economy, it seems. Curious sort of what you guys are seeing since earnings, if you want to comment on that, and how you see things unfolding.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: You know, we are probably the most global card network there is, certainly since we have the license in China. It is a pretty unique perspective. The perspective on consumer spending is particularly unique. As of late, there was not so much government data to come by. Our data, therefore, is telling interesting stories. It holds. I take you back to our earnings call where we said for the whole month of October, we saw solid spending. We saw solid spending on consumer and business spending. When you break it down and say, we just talked about different kinds of card categories. We see solid spending across affluent and mass as well. That is overall positive. You kind of wonder because you have this backdrop and say, yeah, there is fluidity. There is macroeconomic uncertainty. There is where the trade policy shifts taking everybody.

You saw savvy retailers and importers that adjust to uneven tariffs, and they pick the right ones that work for them. There has been much more sustainability in how supply chains have been managed since COVID. Businesses learned that, so they are adjusting. The consumers are adjusting because they are using all the abilities that the digital economy gives them to find a better deal and get a better offer. That helps. What helps even more is you have got a pretty solid labor market that is in balance. Job creation has slowed a bit in the U.S. At the same time, unemployment remains low. The market is in balance. As long as people get paychecks, they will spend. The other thing that we are seeing pretty consistently is, at least in the large economic blocks, that wage increases still outpace inflation levels.

Put all of this together, pretty solid spending. From that perspective, I take it global, the same picture exists everywhere else. We are global, we’re diversified and resilient. I don’t worry that much about the economic picture right now. We keep monitoring. Maybe tonight there’s a vote on the shutdown. That’d be a good thing. That’s another uncertainty that is out there at the moment. Overall, I think pretty steady.

Sanjay: OK. So even through October, we’ve sort of seen the similar trends that you’ve seen?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: I gave you the last data in the call, and there’s nothing new.

Sanjay: OK. Got it. Perfect. AI has definitely been a hot topic of late. I’ve got two questions. First, you’ve been using AI for a long time, but can you talk about how you’re using AI internally and externally?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. So yeah, of course, we needed to talk about AI.

Sanjay: Of course.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: I just came from a conference in California, and that was the only thing that we talked about. There was nothing else to talk about. For us as a company, we have been using artificial intelligence for about a decade. Not Gen AI initially, machine learning. When you think about the 160 billion transactions that run through our network, how do we ensure that the transactions that should go through go through and the ones that should not go through do not go through? It is AI based. This is discriminatory AI. It is model-based machine learning, and we do that very, very well. When you take a step back from that, what has changed now since over the last three years? What has changed in Mastercard when it comes to the use of AI? We started to use generative AI.

We applied, of course, like everybody else, and I’m not going to spend too much time on that, to just make our own company more efficient, make it stronger. For example, that is somewhere nice between internal efficiency, but also driving a better customer experience, is we run a very large consulting business. Here we use AI to do a lot of the analytics work for our customers, which is payments consulting. That is a lot of database that’s all modeled, bot driven, that we have trained on our data and our customers’ data to make that engagement a lot more effective. Where my personal excitement is, is really on product build and what else can be put out there, leveraging latest artificial intelligence and our own data.

I think this is where we really stand out because we have more data than literally anybody else out there. Leveraging that data to bring a better proposition to our customers, I think this is where the differentiator is going to be. We do it a number of ways. If you think about what we do as a company, we try to keep the payment ecosystem safer. On the safety side, we’re having a longstanding product called Decision Intelligence, which is about card authorization. We’re tuning it with external data points to make the fraud detection a lot better. The increase that we’ve seen from taking external data points in microseconds, we’re analyzing a trillion data points in real time to make our transaction approval a better one. We’re seeing a 200% increase. On the other side of that is a bank.

The impact on that, on your P&L, is quite significant. This is a real tangible result of what AI can do. Give you a couple of other examples. Take making payments smarter. They’ve got to be safe. The question is, when do you run a payment? If there’s no balance, then that’s hard. You try to make a payment and there’s no balance. We’re trying to get taking data points in from our customers and from external data to see at what point in time is there likely to be a balance on the account. Here’s what you do. It’s a payment optimization platform product driving massive efficiency for us, for our customers, and turnover for us.

Those are some examples where we’re using the data that we have, plus our AI scientists, plus the experience over the last 10 years to really drive better product. Today, it’s about a third of our services are AI powered. That number has increased over the last three years significantly.

Sanjay: Perfect.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Yeah, differentiator.

Sanjay: No AI conversation is complete without talking about agentic commerce.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right.

Sanjay: All right.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: There’s more excitement than I think warranted when you look at where it is at this point. OK.

Sanjay: Clearly, there’s a lot of excitement, as you said. I’m just curious sort of how you see it developing, what your perspectives are, and how Mastercard capitalizes on the opportunity.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Agentic commerce, for everybody who might have just joined the conference, it’s basically there is a theory that search behavior might change. You might go from your favorite search engine to actually using an AI powered bot to do some of your shopping. Not really the shopping. You ask the bot a certain question about what you want to do in life. Let’s say you want to do a camping trip. You know you have a tent, but you do not know all the other things. You are going to ask the bot. The bot is going to lay out, based on your preferences that you have had from previous chats, here is what you most likely would want. The quality of that suggestion is possibly better than what you get out of a straight search engine. The idea is that consumers might go that way.

There’s also not an unreasonable expectation to think maybe there is more turnover as a result of that because it’s better quality suggestions, and my propensity to buy might actually be higher. There could be an upside potential there. Now, from a consumer perspective, it’s not a dramatic change. You’re still searching for something. You’re just using a different tool that potentially serves you better. For the payment ecosystem, this is a pretty fundamental change because you’re having a different party in the mix, and the party is an agent. The agent is going to authorize a payment on your behalf. Whoa, that could be creepy from a consumer perspective if you don’t feel that this is safe. What happens if something goes wrong? The industry looked at this, the industry at large, including us, and saying, what do you do about this?

The notion is very good. The questions that need to be solved are, you’ve got to legitimize and accredit the agent. You have to figure out how you can authenticate the consumer through an agent and have the agent tell the bank that this is actually a consumer. The bank has to believe that. You have to figure out what happens if something goes wrong because you said, I ordered these running shoes. The bank says, that never arrived with me. Can you prove that? Somewhere from the chat, it has to be ending up in a token that is automatically digested by a bank to drive a chargeback. It gets really complicated. The good thing is we had our first agentic transaction, and the whole thing does work.

It happened in November on our network, and that is exciting. This all leverages existing tokenization technology that we have. It leverages existing cybersecurity solutions that we have to authenticate. It leverages the franchise rules of the Mastercard network. The whole thing is called Agent Pay, and it’s live. We’ll have to see. It’s early days. Is the hype justified? I don’t know because we will provide solutions either/or. For us, it’s a really important option of the future. This might be where consumers go. We’ve always been of the view that consumer choice is what will win. We’ve got to have those solutions. Our banking partner, US Bank and Citi, were the first. We’re going to have everybody in the U.S. live by the end of this year.

I’m going to go live in the early next year for the globe on Agent Pay. So we’ll see. Interesting discussion in the company how to call it. I thought Agent Pay was just a really cool name. Yeah, so we’ll see if it takes hold and where it goes from here. But overall, a significant services opportunity, as I said, cybersecurity, various other things. And from a payments network perspective, the opportunity, possibly more turnover. And a discontinuity in the ecosystem to gain more share if you have a better solution that differentiates you in that space.

Sanjay: Interesting. Great. Let’s move on to another hot topic, stablecoins. Maybe how is Mastercard participating in the stablecoin space? Could you talk about the risks and the opportunities?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. So we just said kind of agentic looks like an upside opportunity. When stablecoins came about as the underlying blockchain technology 10 years ago, that was not the first question. The question that we had at the time was, if we are in the business of facilitating transactions between people that do not know each other, and then somebody walks out with whatever they bought, how do you create that trust? Blockchain was a perfect kind of technology, so it made sense in fundamental terms. We invested for many years, but there was really no momentum. We all remember the Libra days. This was the first time when stablecoins became a discussion. Really, the world was not quite ready. This year, with the passing of the Genius Act here in the U.S., the world is now more ready than it was ever before. We see private capital unleashed.

We see a lot of parties that want to be in the space. I feel very good about the fact that we have been, from an expertise perspective, from a technology perspective, from a kind of crypto-related services perspective, in the business for a long time. Before stablecoins, crypto was the thing. The problem with crypto was the store of value function was the issue. Now, with the peg, that is actually solved. We have quite a business in the on-ramp and off-ramp space that is into crypto assets on the on-ramp with Binance, Bybit, you name it. On the off-ramp, we have just announced, I think, last earnings consensus, MetaMask, Binance again in Brazil, and so forth. It is a thriving business, great growth rates, all that. The stablecoin piece, early days.

What we’ve done in the stablecoin base now that we have regulatory clarity is we said, OK, there will be more people that want to be paid in stablecoins. We’ve enabled the network to do that. If there’s an acquirer, if there’s a merchant that wants to settle with us in stablecoins, they can do that now. It just has to have the regulatory check mark and if we’re good. The Mastercard Move, our disbursement product. If you have a B2C disbursement or a consumer disbursement to some other part of the world, maybe there is a high inflation country at the other end of it. Somebody wants to be paid in a $1 stablecoin. Great. That is also now a Mastercard Move. On-ramp, off-ramp, disbursements, settlement. It’s all there.

10 years of fiddling around, and now we have regulatory clarity, and it looks a lot more real. The simplest term to describe is another currency on our network. And it’s another choice, and it’s a credible choice. So we see that. The value of cards still stands, though. Stablecoins is not the answer for everything because you have issues of identity to solve, of safety security to solve, most importantly, of interoperability. Think about a world where a lot of banks choose their own stablecoins. Countries will have a range of stablecoins that might be different from another company because they obviously denominate them in their own currency and so forth. How does a world interact? Interoperability, standards, safety security solutions. That’s kind of what we do for a living today. We will strive to do that in that world.

Sanjay: Great. At your Investor Day, almost one year ago today, you outlined three strategic priority areas for the company. Maybe we could take a few minutes to get an update on each. Let’s start with consumer payments. Over the past 12 months, what would you highlight there?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. Yeah, I can’t believe it’s been a year.

Sanjay: It’s been a year.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: A lot has happened in this year when we talk, when we just think about what we said earlier on the macro front. The good thing is these three strategic priorities focus on consumer payments, commercial, and new payment flows, which include stable, as well as services. They are anchored in fundamental broad market trends and not so much in macro volatility. They are true today as much as they were true a year ago. Starting with consumer, on a consumer side, we laid out the balance between us driving in, getting into the secular opportunity. There’s been a lot of discussion how much of that is still around. We keep talking about the transaction opportunity. We talk about the secular opportunity in markets that exists today. We go after that with the same tools that we have done for the last 10 years.

Just the experience gets a bit better. The technology gets a little bit better, even better. And there’s differentiated data for us to allow us to do that. I just came back from two days in Mexico. They have, in Mexico, a big focus on digitization. 23% of the personal consumption expenditure only in Mexico is penetrated by digital payments. Only 23%. 77% in the 12th largest economy in the world is not penetrated by digital solutions. And President Sheinbaum and her government are pushing hard to drive that opportunity as an opportunity for growth for Mexico. Is Mexico going to be an economy that will benefit in this current economic, macroeconomic picture? Absolutely. Nearshoring. There’s all sorts of things that are going on in Mexico. We saw a big data center investment just being announced yesterday. So one example, secular opportunity is alive and well.

We’re very busy to go after it. Share gain, going after share is the other thing I laid out at the Investor Day that on the basis of 2023 data, all market share was up. We didn’t have the new numbers yet. We also shared with you that we flipped hundreds of transactions in the year 2024. We keep winning share. I talked about a few of those in the earnings calls, the last couple of ones. American Airlines, if you think about that, just mentioned Nubank coming to the United States that is coming with us. Differentiated solutions leaning in with our customers on the consumer side, where services play a very big role. You recall the virtuous cycle. We differentiate through services and payments. That gives us more payment volume, which gives us more data that allows us to drive differentiated services.

It keeps going. That’s been a big part of a very good story on the consumer side. Not to forget China, and not to forget the account-to-account growth opportunity on secular as well. That’s on the consumer side. Moving forward, very much as we laid it out at the Investor Community Meeting.

Sanjay: Cool. Let’s move on to the second pillar, commercial and new payment flows. Maybe you could give us an update on the strategy and progress there. I mean, do you feel like the commercial opportunity has lagged? I mean, do you feel like that’s the case?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: It has what?

Sanjay: It’s been slower than expected just because if you look at some of the—maybe it’s just the public company market—but there’s been some variability in the AP automation area. Could you just talk about what it really takes to unlock the commercial payments opportunity?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Huge opportunity. I think we laid out about $63 trillion across commercial POS and invoiced payments. I think it’s important to break it down into pockets because it’s not the same true answer across the board. In commercial and new POS, I think there is significant momentum there. We laid out that just in the last call, we already have 10% more cards in the market on the SME side. SME is an opportunity for every government out there. We don’t really need to build anything new. It’s not a question of technological readiness. It’s actually a question of go-to-market. Here, we’ve made a lot of progress. Traditional distribution channel was through banks that are focusing on small business. You see a lot more central banks and governments helping those banks with late lending criteria. Everybody sees the opportunity.

That takes government and a broader ecosystem to come to terms. That was growing at its pace, but it’s growing much more broadly now because you see a lot more banks that are showing up on the scene and say, we can’t ignore small business. It’s also every conversation I have on this topic, as you find a consumer bank that says, well, it turns out my most affluent consumer customers actually are the ones that are running these mid-sized businesses. I better go after it. It kind of makes a lot of sense. I feel that’s going to go at its pace. Where the change in pace is really when we bring alternative distributors in. We made a lot of progress. I gave a bunch of names in the last call, Zaggle from India, Vistucredit. There are good partners.

Vistucredit is actually here. We made a lot of progress there. That is really what is driving growth at this point. Small business, I have no concerns. I think everybody’s aligned that this needs to happen. This is the backbone of most economies out there. On the invoice payment side, it’s a little more complex because the situation you’re in, you’re looking at processes of large companies that are deeply ingrained. These companies are oftentimes organized along the lines of what a particular ERP system requires them to do as companies. From an organizational structure perspective, how the software all works, the various steps. If we come in and say, all right, we would like you to do invoice payment in a different way so it goes faster, that is not just going to be very productive.

We have to find a way that is a horizontal go-to-market. It’s what are the common points that unite these public companies and large businesses that drive these payment files. It is the ERP systems. It’s also core banking systems and so forth. We’ve made good progress. When we had this conversation about a year ago, it was four of these ERP systems. Now we’re up to 10-12, somewhere thereabouts. The next step is to go and say, once you’re in that system, you’ve got to drive volume. That is very known to market. You put incentives. You can drive the right kind of structure. We get that. We’re at that point now. What we see is we see people at the other side who basically like the fact that it’s going to help them automate and make processes redundant.

With the rise of AI, the focus on efficiency and what bad process you can take out is significant. If you come and say, in your payment process, why do you do all these reconciliations? All of this can be automated if you put this right into your system. The arguments today are much more well-received than they have been even a year ago. I feel it is the right time. I said that I think in every earnings call. In every earnings call, it feels a bit better because we see the momentum coming through. It is happening as we speak. Yeah, am I impatient about it? Yeah, probably. A bit faster is good. We have full belief that this is the way to go because everybody shares the same point and sees the same opportunity.

Sanjay: Perfect. Let’s talk about the third strategic pillar, which is value-added services and solutions. Very strong growth there. Maybe you could talk about what’s fueling growth, how sustainable it is, and what the opportunities are on a go-forward basis.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Take the last two quarters. Pretty sustainable. It is kind of growing at actually a higher level than what we laid out at the Investment Community Meeting. We are happy with the growth. When you break it down, why is it consistently producing that kind of growth? If you think about the portfolio of services that we have, it has not happened by chance. It is curated. We initially started off out of the safety and security space at a payment transaction that is already happening. It was a logical evolution for us to say, all right, how do we help before the transaction? How do we help after the transaction? How do we help the business overall that is our customers to run their business better? You go even further away from the transaction. That was the thinking.

Today, you have a set of solutions that cut across payments-related services. We have the network link part, which is 60%. Then you go into the payment-adjacent services before and after the transaction. You have market insights. Do market insights in a murky world matter more than ever before? Through the Mastercard’s Economic Institute, we take our data and we break it down into insights for our customers so they can drive their business better. It’s a very high-demand kind of service for us. You go into consulting. What we do today, two of our topics that we talked about, we do agentic commerce consulting, and we do crypto consulting. We hire people that know this and who have been doing this for us on the product side.

They engage our customer because everybody has this question, what do I do in that kind of space? It is a carefully curated set of services that reinforce each other, plus the payment proposition. From that perspective, I do think that is differentiated. First of all, it is not a narrow set of services on a particular part of the payments ecosystem. It is really built around the key questions that our customers have. This was initially focused on largely one buying center, which was the people that we face off on the payment side. In the companies that we speak to, we today talk to the Chief Marketing Officer, to the Chief Information Security Officer, the CISO, to the Chief Risk Officer. It is a whole set of different wallets and buying centers that we are approaching with this broad portfolio.

From that perspective, you then think that as we drive that around the world, there’s a lot of potential for deepening into existing customers, into these buying centers, new customer types altogether. Hence, with that in mind, we laid out the growth rates that we laid out for three years that we gave at the Investor Community Meeting. I think it’s a really differentiated business. When we shared a 22% growth for the last quarter, it was like you just see that the demand is there. With all the tech change and everything that’s going on around us, it feels like every day we can’t deliver fast enough on our services.

Sanjay: Yeah, clearly it seems to be performing above plan at this point.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Yeah.

Sanjay: Yeah? All right. So you’ve announced several new and innovative solutions in recent months. Maybe we could talk about a few of them. Let’s start with Mastercard Commerce Media. Maybe you could talk about the offering and how you plan to go to market.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. Mastercard Commerce Media. Earlier, we talked about artificial intelligence. What sets us apart is our data. When you take the data, we have a lot of transaction data. We also have different categories of data. We have permissioned proprietary data that sits in our office platform and the loyalty programs that we manage for our customers. We said this data should allow for a better commerce experience. We all experience this in our life today. We get endless emails that are just irrelevant. They clog our inbox. They offer us something. Most likely, you will delete.

Imagine this would be at the right time and at the right channel and something is actually relevant to you and it’s linked to your preferences that you have permission somewhere and say, I’m going to be able to, I’m happy to share this data. You see advertisers that are needing to prove that every dollar that they spend into advertising actually drives ROI. I have the same question to our CMO all the time, Raja, what are you spending the money on? That is a question that probably in most companies is being asked.

We try to square all of this off and said, how about we use our spend data and the proprietary data sets that we have to allow an advertiser to make a more targeted offer and then link it back through the transaction, the payment transaction to prove that it was actually turned into a purchase. Good proposition. It took a bit of time to build it. We went live. We’re now live. We’re live with WPP. It’s a big advertiser out there with Citi, with American Airlines, with Microsoft. It’s a good set of partners to bring this live. I feel that it’s just a natural position for us to make sense of our data for our customers in a very different way. It’s linked to payments as all of our service propositions, but it brings a different angle.

In this case, it’s actually before and after the transaction at the same time. Very excited when I saw the whole coverage at Times Square about Commerce Media on the day of launch. That was a good day for us.

Sanjay: That sounds exciting. Another solution you’ve announced is the Mastercard Threat Intelligence, which leverages your capability from your acquisition of Recorded Future. Can you just tell us about that solution and maybe just a broader update there?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: A couple of words around Recorded Future. In our cybersecurity-related services portfolio, we grew up in the fraud transaction space. Just saying, is this transaction good? Yes or no. We build a whole set of services around that. At the other end of the spectrum of cybersecurity is the overall threat to a company or a government that comes from a state actor, that comes from a consortium of hackers, and so forth. We had nothing to do with that. As we were building out, slice by slice, adding on capabilities to an end-to-end security proposition that we wanted to provide our customer, back to the point about the buying center of the CISO. The CISO needs to know how the company is potentially in the aims of a state actor. It could be a large bank, for example. Most likely, they are facing those threats.

Governments and so forth. Recorded Future is the number one threat intelligence company in the world. We bought them in December last year. We have been busy integrating. One of the synergies we had in mind, we were dreaming big at the time, was we got all this payment data. They got all this threat information. How about you bring both of this together? What is the biggest problem for a company to defend against these threats is you cannot defend against all threats. You cannot fund this. If somebody tells you, here is the threat, you can actually react. Threat intelligence helps you to defend in a very targeted fashion that makes this operationally effective.

If we do that and we combine it with our payments data, you can deal with fraud in a very different and much more targeted fashion. Because you can pick up data out of the dark web where somebody’s doing card testing. Somebody’s going on somewhere in the dark web and saying, I just stole these card numbers, and we’re going to test them. Recorded Future sees that. We take that data, put it together with our payment data, and we advise the banks upfront, this is the card that is most likely the next that will be defrauded. Shut it down. Protect the consumer. Protect the ecosystem with this combination. When we launched this in the market, we had some initial reactions from one of the best banks here in the U.S. that are very good in cybersecurity.

We went to the best to test it. We saw in the space of fake merchants, a lot of fake merchants appear on and at like one day, and people do fake transactions, and then they move on and set up another site. Hundreds of fake merchants were taken down on the first day of that. Very, very encouraging. This combination of payments and cybersecurity is a very logical extension of our value proposition to our customers who are all large enterprises and who are in the aim of some of these threat actors. A bit scary at the same time. I think we’ve got to use the latest technology to stay ahead in this arms race of emerging threats and emerging technology.

Sanjay: I mean, Recorded Future is an example of M&A that you’ve done pretty successfully and tucked it in and sort of created more value propositions. Could you just talk about the decisions you make to buy, partner, or build?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. The decision is not driven by is it cheap? Valuation is not the first question. Obviously, that matters. We look at it from a strategy perspective. Consumer, commercial services, how does it fit into that? Am I better off to buy? From a speed perspective, do we have the street cred? Do we have the talent? Can we build this in a timeline where we feel this is critical from a go-to-market perspective, or will it take us too long, et cetera? It is always the same logic. As you know, who follow our stock and our investors in our company, the hurdles that we put up for ourselves from a return perspective are pretty high as well. You compare, am I better off to build or buy? That is where valuations do come in. We look at that.

Overall, that has not changed. That has been consistent. We continue to be acquisitive. We will always look in these strategic pillars and see what is out there. We ensure that we engage with the private equity community, with the VC community, just to see what is happening, what is coming up so that we have an eye on deal flow and see what is going on. Sachin will always be very active out there.

Sanjay: Got it. Perfect.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: He’s our CFO.

Sanjay: You’ve announced several wins and expansions over the last few years. What’s driving your ability to win?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: I think we just spent 37 minutes talking about that. I think it’s a differentiated services portfolio and a set of leading digital-first payment solutions coming together that drive a differentiated proposition. It sounds like big words. What is he saying? Take American Airlines. This is one of the most successful co-brand portfolios of the world. We renewed it. There was a big question, how do you turn this into a state-of-the-art? How do you take a very well-performing co-brand portfolio and make it the state-of-the-art future co-brand portfolio? We laid out together with American Airlines a vision on where that could go. UniCredit, it’s a massive win from, I think we signed it in 2024. A lot of the cards have now converted. Here was a leading pan-European bank that said, I want a simplified winning solution that cuts across 13 markets.

We believe you guys can do it better because we are very deeply and very locally invested in Europe. We behave like a European company there. That matters in Europe. Big differentiators. Always a little bit of a different nuance on that. I think it really comes down to the strategy is on point for the times that we’re living in and we’re executing well against it. In the end, it comes down to one other aspect that is always a question behind that question. That is, this has to be an attractive financial offer as well. It has to be a competitive offer. That is where we strike the balance. We do not want to win every deal, but we want to win the deals that matter to us and kind of strike that balance.

We co-create and invest with our customers to drive the business forward.

Sanjay: You guys have done a really good job there. Last question. As we look forward, what are some of the areas that make you most excited about Mastercard?

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Right. I’m excited.

Sanjay: Agentic commerce.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Yes. Yes. Actually, secular opportunity.

Sanjay: OK.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: I think there is so much out there on the secular opportunity side. I just gave you this Mexico example. There is so much potential for us. I am excited about that. We do not wake up and say, we need a fourth strategic priority. We love the focus on payments. We see that commercial payment flows is happening right in front of our eyes and that differentiated services portfolio. Keep nurturing it and keep differentiating it. It is helping us on the other two. When I look at what we laid out last year with some great fanfare at our Investor Day, you saw the excitement of the team on stage. That has not changed this year if anything more. With all the things that are going around us, it feels like payment is so central. It is a good time to be in payments.

Sanjay: We’ve run out of time. Michael, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard: Thank you. All right.

Sanjay: Thank you for doing it.

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