Mastercard — What I Think
Being second is underrated. Mastercard spent decades as the other card network, and that turned out to be a feature. The follower doesn’t have to defend a throne. It can move. Visa is the incumbent’s incumbent. Mastercard learned to behave like a challenger inside a duopoly, which is the most interesting thing about it.
The contrarian read: Mastercard figured out before Visa did that the card was going to become the least important thing it owned. The rails were commoditizing. Eventually nation-states would build their own instant systems and route around the networks entirely. So Mastercard went and bought the stuff that sits around the transaction. Identity. Fraud scoring. Open banking plumbing. Cyber, data. The bet was simple: when the toll booth gets disintermediated, sell the cameras and the locks instead.
That’s a genuinely different vision than “defend the network.” The network was never the point. The trust was. And trust unbundles into a dozen products you can sell to the people building their own rails. A national instant-payments system still needs to know if the account on the other end is a mule. Mastercard wants to be the answer to that question no matter whose rail carries the money. Rail-agnostic trust. I think that’s correct.
Where they’re overconfident: they talk about being “multi-rail,” cards, A2A, crypto, CBDCs, as if a seat on every rail is the same as owning the future. It isn’t. A services layer bolted onto someone else’s settlement is a tenant, not a landlord. If on-chain settlement matures, the fraud and identity functions migrate into the protocol and the wallet, and the tenant gets a rent notice. The hedge is real. But it’s a hedge, and hedges have a ceiling.
Still. Of the two networks, Mastercard is the one that actually seems to believe the card era ends. That belief is worth more than any single product.
Favorite & worst CEO
Favorite: Ajay Banga. He took a company that could’ve aged gracefully into a toll collector and gave it a second identity as a data-and-services company, while turning “financial inclusion” into an actual operating thesis instead of a press release. He led with a worldview, not a spreadsheet. The org still runs on the momentum.
Least connected to: the pre-Banga, freshly-public era. Capable people running a card network as a card network. Nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t trying to become anything, and I connect with builders mid-transformation, not mid-maintenance.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.