萬事達 (MA) 2026 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning. My name is Julianne. I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Mastercard Incorporated Q2 2026 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

Thank you. Mr. Devin Corr, Head of Investor Relations, you may now begin your conference.

Thank you, Julianne. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our second-quarter 2026 earnings call.

With me today are Michael Miebach, our Chief Executive Officer; Sachin Mehra, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ling Hai, our President of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East & Africa and incoming CFO, effective August 3.

Following comments from Michael and Sachin, the operator will announce your opportunity to get into the queue for the Q&A session. It is only then that the queue will open for questions.

You can access our earnings release, supplemental-performance data, and the slide deck that accompany this call in the Investor Relations section of our website, mastercard.com.

Additionally, the release was furnished with the SEC earlier this morning.

Our comments today regarding our financial results will be on a non-GAAP, currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. Both the release and the slide deck include reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP reported amounts.

Finally, as set forth in more detail in our earnings release, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements regarding Mastercard's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

Information about the factors that could affect future performance are summarized at the end of our earnings release and in our recent SEC filings.

A replay of this call will be posted on our website for 30 days.

With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Miebach.

Thank you, Devin. Good morning, everyone.

This is Sachin's last earnings call as CFO. He's sitting right across the table.

Before turning to our quarterly results, I'd like to take this moment to thank him and recognize him for the significant impact he's had in the role. Sachin, thank you.

We're excited to see you carry the same focus, discipline, and drive into your new role as Chief Business Officer.

Same time, as you heard from Devin, Ling Hai is in the room today. He will assume the role of CFO, bringing his deep knowledge of our business, our products, and our industry.

You've seen that play out in the company's strong track record of supporting and growing with customers across Asia, Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

These changes, as well as those across the entire leadership team, reflect the strength and depth of our team.

Operating as one team brings complementary experience and perspectives that sharpen focus, strengthen execution, and create greater value for our customers and shareholders.

From a position of strength, this evolution will help us capture the opportunities ahead and continue realizing Mastercard's full potential. That's priceless, of course.

With that, let's drive into this quarter's results. The second quarter of 2026 was another strong quarter for Mastercard.

Net revenues were above our expectations, up 12%; adjusted net income, up 16%; and value-added services' net revenue, up 18% -- all year over year on a non-GAAP, currency-neutral basis.

The macro environment remains supportive. Consumers and businesses are healthy and continue to spend, supported by positive job growth, low unemployment, and real purchasing power in many major economies.

At the same time, we continue to monitor geopolitical uncertainty and its potential economic impacts.

But macro is the only one part of our growth story. Our performance is driven by a clear strategy, disciplined execution, and differentiated value for our customers.

We remain focused on consumer payments; commercial and new payment flows; and value-added services and solutions, each with significant runway and, together, reinforcing Mastercard's virtuous cycle.

That's a good roadmap for today's call. Let's dive in. Starting with the secular opportunity, there is significant runway to digitize consumer and commercial flows for many years to come.

As a reminder: At our last Investor Day, we shared that only a third of consumer transactions were carded. The secular opportunity is even larger in commercial flows.

We're targeting the secular opportunity in a way that drives outsized growth to Mastercard. For example, we continue to work with governments around the world to digitize disbursements and benefits programs, making it easier for consumers to access and use benefits; and driving more volume to Mastercard.

This includes food-assistance programs in the United States, which represent $100 billion of spend each year. Through our exclusive partnership with evermore, we are now rolling out a new program for beneficiaries to have a simple, more secure solution.

We're also capturing incremental transactions through our exclusive partnership with Alipay+, embedding Mastercard credentials into their network of e-wallets.

This quarter, we're expanding this partnership in Mexico with Clip, a leading fintech with a small- and micro-business network approaching 1 million merchants.

Combining Clip's merchant network, Alipay+ wallet capabilities, and Mastercard's global payment capabilities is a powerful solution to digitize payments in Mexico. That's a country where more than 70% of consumer payments are cash-based.

Mastercard is exclusively tokenizing the stored wallet balances, enabling users to transact across Mastercard's global acceptance network.

Complementing our efforts to drive outsized secular growth, we are finding new ways to power payments. Switching is critical to our virtuous cycle. More switched transactions lead to more data to fuel our services and increase our ability to distribute services over our network.

We've steadily increased our switching penetration, now reaching 72%. The reason: Mastercard's rich value proposition, especially compared to local networks. It's our global acceptance reach, consumer protections, digital capabilities, and security overlays.

We're also expanding our role in switching by flexing our network architecture. We're adapting to best meet the needs of the markets that we serve, while ensuring we meet our long-term growth objectives and drive the virtuous cycle.

That's exactly what we're doing in the United Arab Emirates. The Central Bank of the UAE, through its subsidiary, Al Etihad Payments, is partnering with Mastercard to build the switching technology in the UAE for the next phase of the country's domestic payments infrastructure.

We will serve as the prime international scheme for co-badged credit cards with the domestic scheme named Jaywan.

As part of this partnership, Mastercard will provide switching services behind domestic debit and Jaywan-Mastercard co-badged credit transactions in the UAE. These transactions are incremental to what we process through our global switch.

Mastercard will also provide value-add services to the domestic switch, including fraud prevention and cybersecurity. Our direct relationships with ecosystem customers in the UAE continue, as they do today.

That's our best-in-class technology at work locally, powering the UAE's digital economy, facilitating more transactions and further scaling our services. That is another example of how we partner locally to drive collective value.

We continue to win and expand issuing relationships across our business. In the first half of 2026, we won several hundred flips and deal expansions, which are expected to drive trillions of dollars in incremental volume to our network over the next decade.

This quarter, we renewed a key partnership with JPMorgan Chase on the Chase Freedom Flex portfolio in the US; and, in Mexico, renewed our partnership with Banamex, where we have exclusivity for nearly all portfolios, representing almost 19 million cards.

We've expanded our partnership with Revolut, now supporting their affluent debit proposition, Ultra, across Singapore and Australia, plus their commercial portfolio in New Zealand, all building up on our growing partnership in the US and longstanding relationship, globally.

We flipped through Alliance Federal Credit Union's US credit and debit portfolios, as well as Eurobank's entire consumer and commercial portfolios in Greece. Once complete, that's over 1 million new Mastercards across the two.

We launched new co-brands with Uber and Hilton in Mexico. With a recent flip in Saudi National Bank's travel co-brand portfolio, we're now the exclusive partner across their credit, debit, prepaid, and commercial portfolios.

I shared some wins that span commercial already. But let's dig into that a bit more. Mastercard's commercial debit and credit volumes grew at 12% in the second quarter. We continue to build on this momentum, as banks and large corporates turn to Mastercard for modernized commercial-payment capabilities.

We've added on average 6 million new Mastercard small-business cards to the market each quarter for the past several quarters.

We see incremental issuance from this quarter's wins, including Intuit in the United States. Truist Bank in the US has chosen Mastercard's leading virtual-card capabilities for their corporate clients' invoice-based payments needs.

Also, we continue to support global money movement through Mastercard Move, most recently partnering with WeChat Pay Hong Kong and FlyRemit in India.

And then, in the travel space, we have an exclusive partnership with Riyadh Air, Saudi Arabia's new national airline. This is an exciting global first, as consumers can use their suite of branded prepaid and credit cards to purchase tickets and build brand loyalty, while travel agents benefit from seamless virtual-card payments and Riyadh Air can streamline supplier payments.

We're winning. Our geographic footprint, differentiated proposition, and innovation allow us to capture more of the market.

We have added over [230 million] net new Mastercards into the market in the 12 months through quarter two of this year. That's new issuers, expanded relationships, and even more payment transactions, more tokens -- all of which we can also attach services to.

When you think about our virtuous cycle, it's real and at scale. The combination of that network scale, the breadth of our data, the depth of our customer relationships with differentiated services underpin our long-term sustainable growth.

Our services benefit from Mastercard's proprietary transactional data, as well as open finance; loyalty; and identity trends and insights. This also includes bespoke services, like consulting, marketing, both key to winning carded market share and optimizing our portfolios.

For example, starting this quarter, we're managing the portfolio conversions for Westpac in Australia and Yapı Kredi in Turkey, following our recent wins.

We're working with Santander in the UK to accelerate cross-border spend through targeted marketing campaigns. Our work with Bancolombia will help optimize their small-business and commercial portfolios. The outcome: more payments volume.

Moving to security solutions -- a hot topic in today's environment -- the proliferation of AI and new frontier models are amplifying new needs. We're seeing increased demand for Mastercard's robust and unique security solutions, as clients navigate the ever-expanding threat landscape.

Today, we have differentiated capabilities that span cybersecurity, identity, and fraud. Our value suite is unmatched. We continue to build up on it. Let me share a few examples:

We're identifying threats before they materialize. How? We're bringing Recorded Future's market-leading intelligence capabilities to our clients globally and seeing strong engagement across sectors.

This quarter, we partnered with Wipro, a global information-technology and consulting company, to further scale our capabilities.

Building up on our acquisition of Recorded Future, we also launched Mastercard Threat Intelligence, specifically for payment fraud. In its first three quarters, Threat Intelligence has identified more than 7 million card-testing transactions across 192 countries.

Stopping that activity prevented an estimated $172 million in fraud linked to malicious domains. That's real value to us; our customers; and, of course, our cardholders.

We're strengthening security and customer experiences. Mastercard's identity solutions help customers authenticate identities for payment and non-payment use cases.

This quarter, Rogers Communications in Canada and Delivery Hero leveraged Mastercard's identity capabilities to verify transaction authenticity, customer onboarding, and more.

We continue to make commerce safer through new innovations. Mastercard Merchant Trust Services is a new suite of AI-powered capabilities to help identify fraudulent merchants.

Keeping the scammers from setting up shop will reduce fraud, cut out disputes, and provide greater security. The goal: real transactions for real purchases from real merchants.

Our Value-Added Services and Solutions growth engine is strong and durable. We benefit from the underlying market tailwinds in security; data and AI; personalization; and more.

There are also natural synergies between our Value-Added Services and Solutions and our Payment Network. That includes distribution.

Today, about 60% of our Value-Added Services and Solutions net revenue is network-linked. We're attaching services to Mastercard switched transactions, as well as faster-growing drivers, such as tokens or card-not-present transactions.

Customers are using more Mastercard services, both existing and new products. We do so through direct engagement and through distribution partners.

We recently launched Mastercard Advantage Partner Program and have more than 200 partners expanding our reach.

All of this drives growth and expanding yields: more customers, more services adopted by each with higher contract value. That's the virtuous cycle at work, again. That's powerful.

We play a central role in commerce today. We are shaping the future of commerce. We're helping our customers navigate that future.

Agentic commerce is the next evolution in payments, where the importance of security, transparency, and control only increase. Agentic commerce creates a significant opportunity for Mastercard. It leads to incremental transactions and even more opportunity for our services.

Through Mastercard Agent Pay, we're helping power secure and trusted agentic transactions across our global acceptance network using tokenization, zero-liability protections, and unique dispute-resolution capabilities.

These capabilities are just a few of the reasons why we expect cards will prevail in an agentic world, both in consumer and commercial use cases. It's early days but engagement across the globe is energizing.

The rise of agentic commerce also brings about an entirely new class of payment use cases: machine-to-machine payments. This is an expansion of our addressable market and one that we are at the forefront.

We recently announced Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines, which enables AI agents to purchase low-value digital services, such as APIs, compute, data, content at machine speed.

With on-chain permissioning and off-chain settlement, Mastercard is the only network enabling machine-to-machine payments.

An ecosystem is rallying behind us. At launch, we had more than 30 industry leaders participating, including Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and OKX. We are a first mover in this space; and one with credibility and trust to deliver.

Next is stablecoins. We believe stablecoins have great potential. But, to work, there are a few essential principles for it to scale: reliability, security, and interoperability. That's what Mastercard delivers.

There's clear utility for stablecoins, for example, in some B2B and P2P flows but no problem to solve in P2M. In fact, digital-asset players are choosing to partner with Mastercard to unlock trusted commerce at scale, benefiting from our global acceptance network, protections, and security.

We offer a wide variety of crypto co-branded propositions. We're seeing strong traction. Our crypto co-brand volume has more than tripled over the last two years. This quarter, we expanded our relationships with Bitget and Kraken.

Stablecoins are additive to our network. It's another opportunity for us to enable choice in how our customers and cardholders engage in commerce.

We're also enabling our customers to participate in the emerging digital-asset ecosystem through the creation of open standards.

For our customer, it provides direct participation, reduced dependency on third parties, and the benefits of distributed economics. Open USD is set to go live later this year. It's another coin that we will enable across our network.

We believe the space will evolve and, with it, will be a creation of digital assets, including blockchains, coins, and tokenized deposits, all operating in tandem and with fiat. That's an opportunity for us.

We expect to close the BVNK acquisition this quarter. With BVNK, Mastercard will serve as the trusted interoperable layer, enabling customers to send, receive, store, and convert assets.

BVNK's enterprise-grade payment-orchestration capabilities, robust licensing, and connectivity are highly differentiated. They are in market today.

In summary, we have a proven strategy and continue to deliver consistently strong results. Our confidence is backed by proof points.

We are winning. We're capturing outsized growth. We're delivering differentiated value. We are shaping the future of commerce. That is what drives sustainable growth.

Sachin, over to you one more time.

Great. Well, thank you, Michael.

Look, before I jump into the numbers, I'd like to take a moment to thank all of our investors and analysts. I truly appreciate your engagement, your thoughtful questions, and the support over the past seven-plus years that I've had the privilege of serving as the CFO of this company.

Mastercard is a special company with so much opportunity ahead. I'm excited to continue driving our strategy from a different seat.

I'm not going very far. Our paths will cross again in a different capacity. I look forward to it.

Now, let's dive in. Turning to page 3, which shows our financial performance for the second quarter on a currency-neutral basis, excluding, where applicable, special items and the impact of gains and losses on our equity investments, net revenue was up 12%, reflecting continued growth in our Payment Network and our Value-Added Services and Solutions, with minimal impact from dispositions.

Operating expenses increased 10%, including a 1 ppt benefit from dispositions. Operating income was up 14%.

Net income and EPS increased 16% and 19%, respectively, driven, primarily, by the strong operating-income growth in the quarter. EPS was $5.04, which includes a $0.14 contribution from share repurchases.

During the quarter, we repurchased $4.9 billion worth of stock and approximately $700 million of additional stock through July 27, 2026.

Now, turning to page 4, where I'll speak to the growth rates of our key volume drivers for the second quarter on a local-currency basis, worldwide gross dollar volume or GDV increased by 8%, year over year. In the US, GDV increased by 6%, with credit growth of 10% and debit growth of 1%.

As a reminder, the Capital One debit portfolio migration was basically complete in Q1. Excluding the impacts from that migration, our US debit GDV growth would have been 8%.

Outside of the US, GDV increased 9%, with credit growth of 9% and debit growth of 10%. Cross-border volume increased 12%, globally, for the quarter, reflecting continued growth in both travel and non-travel related cross-border spending.

Turning to page 5, switched transactions grew 9% year over year in Q2. We continue to drive contactless penetration, which, in Q2, stood at 80% of all in-person switched purchase transactions. This is up 5 ppt since the same period last year.

Token penetration reached over 40% of all switched transactions this quarter. In addition, card growth was 5%. Globally, there are 3.7 billion Mastercard and Maestro-branded cards issued.

Turning to slide 6 for a look into our net-revenue growth rates for the second quarter, discussed on a currency-neutral basis, Payment Network net revenue increased 8%, primarily driven by domestic and cross-border transaction, and volume growth, as well as pricing. It also includes growth in rebates and incentives.

Value-Added Services and Solutions net revenue increased 18%. This includes a minimal drag from dispositions. The increase was driven primarily by growth in our underlying drivers; strong demand for our security solutions; consumer acquisition and engagement; digital and authentication; and business and market insights; and pricing.

Now, let's turn to page 7 to discuss key metrics related to the Payment Network. Again, all growth rates are described on a currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted.

Looking quickly at each key metric: Domestic assessments were up 10%, while worldwide GDV grew 8%. The 2 ppt difference is primarily driven by pricing.

Cross-border assessments increased 20%, while cross-border volumes increased 12%. The 8 ppt difference is driven primarily by pricing in international markets and mix.

Transaction-processing assessments were up 12%, while switched transactions grew 9%. The 3 ppt difference is primarily due to favorable mix and pricing, partially offset by lower revenue from FX volatility. Other-network assessments were $326 million this quarter.

Moving on to page 8, you can see that, on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis, excluding special items, total adjusted operating expenses increased 10%, which includes a 1 ppt benefit from dispositions.

The growth in operating expenses was primarily driven by spending to drive the execution of our strategic priorities, including initiatives to further harden our infrastructure, geographic expansion, and product innovation.

Turning to page 9, let me comment on the operating metric trends for Q2 and the first four weeks of July: Switched metrics were generally in line with Q1. Underlying spend remained stable.

Of note, excluding Capital One debit, on a like-for-like basis, US switched volume growth was 10% or 2 ppt higher, sequentially. This increase was driven by higher spend on fuel; and overall strong consumer and business spending.

Moving to our cross-border metrics, our overall cross-border volume growth remained healthy at 12% in the second quarter. Cross-border card-not-present, ex-travel, remained strong at 20%, benefiting from increased card-not-present spend from Venezuela and the timing of large retail promotional events.

While cross-border travel was down sequentially, relative to the April metrics we discussed on our last earnings call, we saw improved growth in the quarter due to lower impacts from the developments in the Middle East and timing of holidays.

Now, as we look at the first four weeks of July, our metrics remain relatively stable and strong. Looking, specifically, at card-not-present, ex travel, let's focus on July compared to June:

The sequential decline is primarily driven by timing, including the large retail promotional events that happened in June this year, as compared to July last year; and by mix of days.

Turning to page 10, in Q2, Mastercard delivered above expectations. This strong performance was broad-based, with the upside primarily driven by lower-than-anticipated impact from the challenges in the Middle East; an uptick in cross-border spend out of Venezuela, where we are market leaders; and strong demand for our Value-Added Services and Solutions.

These results, despite an uncertain global geopolitical and economic backdrop, are evidence of the resilience of our diversified business model and our continued focus on execution across both Payment Network and Value-Added Services and Solutions.

As Michael said, we continue to see a macroeconomic environment that is generally supportive. Around the world, economies are adapting to changing conditions, with consumers and businesses continuing to demonstrate resilience. This is reflected in our underlying drivers.

We continue to monitor geopolitical tensions and related energy prices, along with critical economic data, like unemployment, inflation, and so on. But, overall, the underlying fundamentals of consumer and business spending; and travel remain healthy.

As we look at the second half of the year, our base case continues to assume spending remains healthy. As noted earlier, impacts from the instability in the Middle East moderated throughout the second quarter and were less severe than we anticipated.

As we look to the rest of the year, we estimate impacts from the Middle East conflict will remain at similar levels to what we saw towards the end of Q2.

As you know, the environment in the Middle East remains dynamic. But, remember, we are a diversified company. That's true across payment products, geographies, spend categories, and services. This, coupled with our continued execution, helps us navigate across a range of operating environments.

Now, turning to our thoughts for Q3 and the remainder of the year, which include the impacts related to the acquisition of BVNK that we expect to close in Q3:

As it relates to our expectations for the third quarter of 2026, year-over-year net revenue growth is expected to be at the high end of low-double-digits range on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity.

We expect a minimal impact from inorganic activity and a headwind of approximately 0.5 ppt from foreign exchange, given the recent trajectory of the US dollar.

From an operating expense standpoint, we expect Q3 growth to be at the low-double-digits range versus a year ago on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity and special items.

We anticipate a 0.5 ppt headwind from inorganic activity, while foreign exchange is forecasted to be a tailwind of approximately zero to 0.5 ppt for the quarter.

As we look to the full year of 2026, we expect net revenue growth to be at the high end of low-double-digits range on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity.

Although this is the same range we shared previously, we now expect to be higher within the range than our prior expectations, largely due to our stronger first-half performance.

We anticipate minimal impact from inorganic activity and a tailwind of approximately 1 ppt from foreign exchange.

As it relates to operating expenses, year-over-year growth is expected to remain at the low-double-digits range versus a year ago on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity and special items.

We expect a minimal impact from inorganic activity and a headwind of 0.5 ppt to 1 ppt from foreign exchange on a full-year basis.

Other items to keep in mind: On other income and expense, in Q3, we expect an expense of approximately $125 million. This is higher, sequentially, driven primarily by incremental interest expense related to our bond issuance in June. This excludes gains and losses on our equity investments, which are excluded from our non-GAAP metrics.

Finally, we expect a non-GAAP tax rate in the range of 20% to 21% for both Q3 and Q4.

With that, I will turn the call back over to Devin.

Thank you. Julianne, you may now open the queue for questions.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Ramsey El-Assal, Cantor Fitzgerald.

Hi. Thank you for taking my question.

I wanted to ask you about stablecoins and agentic commerce, together. They're both focus areas for you. You commented on them in your prepared remarks.

Do you see use cases in agentic that will require stablecoins; something like micro-transactions, perhaps? Or can traditional Mastercard credentials basically fulfill all the use cases that stablecoins can?

I'm just trying to figure out whether there's a unique value proposition you're looking to solve for with stablecoins.

Right. Thank you for that question, Ramsey.

As we were laying out earlier, we're innovating around the future of payments. These are two areas that will shape the future of payments: agentic commerce and stablecoins.

Let me start off by talking just agentic commerce; and then, we see how transactions can flow in agentic commerce.

There's the consumer-oriented use cases in agentic commerce where our keyword search turns changes. We may use agents for that. That could be an LLM. That could be a first-party agent by a large retailer.

There are transactions that are now, then, delegated to agents. That can happen very well through the existing card networks.

What you need for that is -- that's what merchants always need. They need reach. They need predictable user experiences. That's the same. That's true for consumers.

We really believe that cards will prevail in that world. This is a tremendous opportunity for us, also, on the services side through tokenization: inside tokens and so forth.

We talked about this many times. The card infrastructure; and the card ecosystem; and the Mastercard proposition within that is unique.

It's unique because we have additional capabilities that we put into the Agent Pay protocol from us. One of them is Verifiable Intent, which allows you to, basically, challenge a transaction and, say, I never wanted to buy this. And then, the charge-back process can kick back in. This was innovated together with Google.

There's some unique propositions here on the Agent Pay side. But it just basically comes back to the main point that cards can prevail there.

Now, if you look on the B2B side, you can see there's a range of agentic-commerce transactions that can happen, where you have an agent that does purchasing for a company. That can very well happen on the card ecosystem, very similar to what I just said on the consumer side.

Amounts, speeds, purposes, they will need the protections; they need the global reach -- all of that can apply. We believe that's a continued opportunity for us, particularly on the services side, again.

Now, there could be an entirely new range of transactions. That is machine-to-machine payments. That is low-ticket, micro-ticket transaction that happens at very high velocity.

For that, we can see a world emerging, where different underlying infrastructure is required. For that, we've put out our protocol, which is an evolution of Agent Pay, which is Agent Pay for Machines. This is the only network protocol that's out there today to facilitate that.

Now, the underlying infrastructure for that, we've mapped it out. You can start to see that there is a transaction that is recognized from one agent to another; these machines talking to each other. But the settlement happens through different kinds of rails.

That could involve stablecoins. But it also could involve different types of settlements. We're actually quite open to that.

But what it needs is the immediacy of these agents to recognize that transaction. That is what Agent Pay for Machines actually does.

That is a [connection] to stablecoins. You could see that stablecoins play a role but not the only thing. Stablecoins, on the other hand, for us, is a separate topic, generally.

While it will play a role in the financial ecosystem of the future, which is why we have been investing, our current approach on stablecoins is, really, facilitating that you can spend your crypto balances, if you still want to -- or your stablecoin balances -- that you purchase the same.

We facilitated settlement on our networks, if that is so wanted. We facilitate money movements using stablecoins to drive immediacy, really, and transparency of cost.

It's also true that stablecoin isn't the answer to everything because you still need protections. You still need acceptance. You still need to find your way into fiat.

We expect a world of multiplicity: many coins, many chains. All of that needs a trusted interoperable layer because people will transact across different coins and so forth. That is what BVNK will do for us.

Sachin mentioned it. We're expecting to close the BVNK acquisition. That is another tremendous opportunity for us. Across the whole thing, there's still services opportunities for us.

That's a lot more than you asked for, Ramsey. But it is all very important. We're very excited about it. The two topics, very much to your questions, they do interlink.

Sanjay Sakhrani, KBW.

Thank you. Good morning. Sachin and Ling Hai, congratulations, again.

Sachin, I have a question for you on the acceleration you saw in cross-border from April to June and into July. I know you mentioned the impacts of the Middle East conflict being lower. But it seems like a pretty sizable lift.

I'm curious if the World Cup had any play in that and factored into that. And then, should we expect some moderation? Obviously, anything else to call out?

Thank you.

Sure, Sanjay. A couple of things to actually talk to, as it relates to the trends we saw between April, May, and June:

Certainly, you saw a recovery, in terms of cross-border travel, in the Middle East. Now, just to give you a little bit of color as to what we're seeing in the Middle East, broadly speaking:

We did see better spending trends, as it relates to outbound from the impacted [GCC] countries into other parts of the globe. Hard to identify whether that's necessarily tied to the World Cup or not.

But we saw trends, which were starting to actually present themselves across both consumer spending and commercial spending.

For me, the way I think about it is, greater confidence in terms of how people are actually doing that outbound spend.

That's also tied, by the way, to increasing capacity from flights and airlines and things of that sort. That's important to recognize.

The other thing, which has been supportive of cross-border, yeah, during the quarter has been Venezuela. I called this out in my prepared remarks. Important to understand what's going on there.

I think all of you are aware that we deconsolidated our Venezuela operations in 2018, where we deconsolidated revenue and we deconsolidated volumes at that point in time, primarily due to the fact that it was a very challenged repatriation environment at that point in time.

The ability to actually get US dollars from Venezuela was challenged. Well, what we've seen is actually very interesting because, over the course of the first quarter and, particularly, going into the second quarter, there has become an increased availability of US dollars in Venezuela.

What that's effectively meant is that consumers have greater access to US dollars. They're utilizing those US dollars for their cross-border spending, mostly, in what we call card-not-present, ex-travel. That's less about travel. That's more about card-not-present, ex-travel.

Also, just put a bow around it: We are the market leaders, as it relates to Venezuela. It's primarily a debit market so that's where you're seeing that spend come through.

What you're seeing is the impact of both -- that more of, I say, lower-than-April effect, which came through in May and June, as it relates to outbound travel from the Middle East.

But what you're also seeing is the trends from Venezuela, which have been holding up pretty well, to be honest with you.

This is a competitive differentiator for us. We are the market leaders. As you've seen the US-dollar availability come into play, you've seen that volume come through in terms of what we're seeing in card-not-present, ex-travel, there.

Andrew Jeffrey, William Blair.

Thank you. Good morning.

I wanted to drill down, perhaps, a little bit, Michael, on some of the domestic switching comments you made. I think the UAE initiative, in particular, is pretty compelling.

What other markets are you targeting for those kinds of solutions? I wonder if, given all of Mastercard's capabilities, Europe is potentially ripe, despite their closed-loop initiatives for the same solutions?

Great question. Important topic. I want to take you back. I'll make it slightly shorter than previous answer, I think.

I'll take you back to 2022, though. This was a time when we were in COVID and we said, with everything that's going on, it's important to invest in the resilience of our business.

We put a particular focus on a technology strategy, really, with the goal to allow us to run anything, anywhere. That's what we did at the time. It drove the modularity of our network.

That instance in the UAE is exactly that. We're basically running a part of the switch in the UAE. It gives us access to transactions that we didn't have before.

It's a good partnership, from that perspective; upside for us. But it gives that resilience and global technology to the UAE -- tremendous partnership.

It's not the only partnership, though, where we have that. We have different versions of that but always coming back to: It has to work, from a technology perspective; has to work, from an economics perspective. The give-and-take have to work for us.

But then, we can get access to more transactions, which fuel our virtuous cycle, as I said before. We've done something like this in South Africa, where we built a real-time payment switch that can actually carry anything.

It can carry any ISO 20022 transaction; can carry a card transaction. This is the technology that we have or we're in the process of making available in Europe.

Now, Europe, it's a very competitive market, with lots of payment choices for consumers there on the P2P side; on the card side. The digital euro is in the making. There's a lot going on in Europe.

We feel very good that we have this technology that allows us to partner in different ways. For now, we are very well positioned with our card proposition in Europe.

We used to be Eurocard so we have deep European roots. We're competing very effectively today.

As far as there are these local alternatives, various local giros and so forth, a lot of co-badged partnerships -- we partner with the wallets like Swish in Sweden; like Bizum in Spain so wide set of options, right now.

At this point in time, we bring the most value through our card propositions. But we have the flexibility to do what we need to do, should the time come and we find better engagements. That's how I look at it.

You go into Asia. You see, in the stand, there are partnerships that we have with switches and so forth in other parts of the world. This run anything, anywhere.

Concept is really important for us to see where the world is going. But it always comes down to our economic principles, apply our services, economics, and standard technology that we can use so we don't have a 1,000 flowers blooming landscape for us.

Dolev, Mizuho.

Hey, guys. Great quarter. Congrats, Michael and Sachin.

I had a question about VAS, specifically about cyber demand. We think, given what we're seeing in security software, [MPOS] is driving very strong demand for cyber demand.

Can you maybe unpack the upside to that for Mastercard? Because it should be a pretty big catalyst, in our view.

Thank you.

Right. On this safety and security part of our portfolio -- great question, Dan; hello, once more -- we have gone much deeper than other market participants on their cyber side, recognizing that, as the world digitizes faster, clearly, that's an underlying growth driver for us; a tailwind for us. There is more demand.

We initially started out in fraud. We're now in fraud and identity. We're in cyber. That is the portfolio. Those are the three big categories.

On the cyber side, we've strengthened our proposition with the addition of Recorded Future. That's what the portfolio is.

Currently, when you think about what is occupying the minds of CEOs; what's occupying the minds of Directors in the boardroom, it is cybersecurity:

The recent discussions around frontier models. How do you go about them? Is it more of a threat? Or is it actually a helpful tool for us to identify vulnerabilities in your company's technology? It's a bit of both. We have been engaging from day 1 on that.

All of this puts cyber into the center of the discussion. We have strong relationships with cyber in a lot of our customers, really, through the fraud side.

That is a natural growth path for us to engage the CISO and talk about the expanded capabilities that we have; while, at the same time, the CEO talks to the CISO and say, what are we doing to protect ourselves?

It all comes together in the moment. We're meeting the moment with this portfolio.

When I was talking earlier about threat intelligence, here, with this ever-expanding threat landscape, it is almost impossible for any company to meet every fraud risk that potentially is.

What you really need to know is you have to have targeted information on how you might be targeted and what is the threat vector that applies to you the most so you can actually focus there. That's very much what Recorded Future does today.

If you take all of that together, I think we're in a good position here. As far as our own cybersecurity goes, of course, we have found that leveraging the latest frontier models help us accelerate identifying vulnerabilities.

We take those learnings and those best practices on how to do that; and share that with our customers around the world so that we can keep the whole ecosystem safer.

Fundamentally, a strong trend for us. But let's not forget, it's not maybe that sexy but everyday fraud -- I gave you that example on the $172 million of fraud prevented on malicious domains -- all that is powering our cybersecurity business today.

It's attached to the transaction growth that we talked about all the transactions that we're going after. This is a flywheel that is very much needed, right now.

Obviously, fraud and cyber risks are not a good thing. But they happen to be a part of a business that we're very good at. We're helping our customers with that.

Harshita Rawat, Bernstein.

Hi. Good morning.

I want to ask about Europe. It's a very important region for you. If I look at purchase volumes, it used to grow in the mid-teens. Now, the growth has decelerated a little bit.

Maybe talk about the drivers there in terms of macro, competitive environment, local dynamics? I know there's a little bit of smaller contribution from Asia conversions, as well. How should we think about the growth in the region?

Thank you.

Hey, Harshita. I just want to make sure I'm clear as which region you're talking about. I didn't quite pick up.

Europe.

You said Europe? Okay.

Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Look, at the end of the day, our business in Europe continues to perform exceedingly well. We are very much in the space of working very closely with our customers to deliver a ton of value. They're seeing that come through in the nature of the partnerships, which we've got there.

I'm going to take you back a few years to talk a little bit about all the wins we had in Europe because a lot of that explains the trend which you're talking about right here.

Because if you look at the trend, in terms of purchase volumes in Europe, right, back in Q2 of 2024, we were growing at 16%.

At that point in time, what you were seeing was the tailwind of all of these wins come through, whether it was Santander or the fact that we've got wins with NatWest or UniCredit -- you name it.

All of that stuff was coming through in those quarters, which was giving us a lift in terms of the share wins.

Naturally, what's going to happen after that, if you're looking at comparable growth rates on a sequential basis, you're going to start to see the lapping effect of that come through. That's certainly a factor, which explains what's going on there.

And then, we've been pretty clear about what deals we want to win and what deals we're going to actually pursue.

There have been deals which we have competed for. But we've done it within the realm of what we thought made good financial sense for us. If it didn't work out, we've actually passed on it.

For example, in Lloyds Credit, we've deliberately actually decided to go to a certain point in time; after which, you have to make a call as to whether it makes economic sense or doesn't make economic sense for the company. That's what we did.

You're seeing that come through, as well, in the nature of the roll-off of those volumes -- very much the case. That discipline is something we're going to adopt and have always adopted because it's really, really important for us.

Volume for the sake of volume is not what this company should be chasing. Profitable volume, which is going to drive higher net revenue yield, is what we're going to chase. We're going to do it in a manner which works well for our partners to drive higher growth for our partners.

You know this but I'll just say this anecdotally: Winning share of a portfolio, which is growing at 1%, helps me in the first year; and then, is a huge drag on growth for the years, thereafter. If you can't really grow the portfolio, it doesn't really matter.

That is very much the philosophy we adopt. I know you asked the question, broadly, around Europe and trends. But you also asked about the competitive environment. Hopefully, that gives you a little bit of color on the mindset that we adopt in terms of how we're actually running our business.

Tien-tsin Huang, JP Morgan.

Great. Thanks. Good morning. Thanks and congrats to Sachin.

On the US growth, quite healthy here. Just curious how broad-based that is. Any difference in income bands to call out? Because, again, that 10%, ex-cost Capital One, is really quite strong. Just trying to get a sense of it has legs.

Thanks.

Yeah. Sure, Tien-tsin.

Look, at the end of the day, the business continues to perform really well. The strong underlying consumer and business spending, which we're seeing in the US -- there has been a tailwind, which has come on account of higher fuel prices so let's recognize that.

You probably have some impact coming through from the World Cup, as well, as it relates to the second quarter, in particular. Hard to really quantify what that is just because we can't really identify exactly what that is.

But I would tell you, the underlying consumer and business spending trends continue to hold up well in the US.

To your point, if I look at it, it's broad-based. We see it across credit and debit. We see it across consumer and commercial.

Look, the teams are busy. They're busy with our customers, helping drive the growth of the customers, which, at the end of the day, is what matters, right?

Because our customers grow. We bring our services, assets to them; help them grow their portfolios, which is accretive, from a volume standpoint but, also, from a revenue standpoint. We're certainly seeing that come through.

On your question about mass versus affluent, Tien-Tsin, I would say, they're holding up well, both across mass and affluent; certainly in the US but across the world, as well.

We try and track the best we can, as it relates to what we're seeing in spending patterns, based on the product codes that are out in the market, which serve the different categories of customers. When we look at that, we're seeing generally strong trends across both mass and affluent.

What you do tend to see is higher growth in the affluent side of spending. That's not a new phenomenon. That's been with us for some time now.

Rayna Kumar, Oppenheimer.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question.

I noticed you had a nice acceleration in APMEA, in your payments volume, so 11% from 9% in the last quarter. Just wondering what the dynamics are there; and if that type of growth is sustainable in the region, going forward.

Thank you.

Yeah, Rayna. A couple of things to keep in mind:

Underlying growth continues to perform well in APMEA, as the broader region is known right here. The step-up that you're seeing between Q1 and Q2 is driven by a couple of factors:

Number 1, there's a lapping effect. You'll remember, last year, in the second quarter, we had highlighted that there was some moderation in select markets in the Middle East. You're lapping that effect come through in terms of the growth rate.

And then, you've also got the impact of fuel, which is coming through in terms of trends. That's not truly in APMEA.

That's true, broad-based, actually -- the impact of higher fuel prices -- but not to take away from the fact that the business continues to do well and we continue to actually drive good growth across the portfolio there.

Tim Chiodo, UBS.

Great. Thanks a lot.

I want to also touch on the cyber fraud and identity portion of the Value-Added Services portfolio. There's a key underlying word or theme that I think we could maybe hit on here, which is the agnostic -- basically, the products being very agnostic -- from two ways:

One is across card networks. The other is, even across non-payments use cases, many of which you alluded to earlier. I was hoping you could talk about that aspect of these services.

A minor, minor numbers-question related to this: There's been a few acquisitions and dispositions since you last gave the mix of Value-Added Services from this category. It was around 40% before.

If there's been any minor update to that mix, that would be appreciated, as well. Thanks.

Okay. Let me take the first part, while Sachin thinks about the mix.

Of course, the safety-security portfolio that we have cuts across a number of dimensions. As I said before, it started off in card fraud. And then, it branched out from card fraud into identity; into threat intelligence, cybersecurity, at large, and so forth.

But, to your point, there is the other dimension is -- now, fraud doesn't only happen on cards; account-to-account scams and account take-over threats and so forth. This is all the reality, unfortunately, today.

There is a tremendous opportunity for us to engage our customers there. Now, cards live in an ecosystem. Here, to come to a common fraud solution through our rules is something that's a little easier than the account-to-account side, where this is infrastructure.

But we have learned through Vocalink and our real-time payment expertise how to do this now in account-to-account payments. That is the first step that we've done there to prevent account-to-account fraud through, like, a consortium approach with the banks in the UK.

That is a good first step. That's a bit earlier on its journey but a significant opportunity that we see, going forward.

Tim, on your question on mix, just to reiterate, what Michael mentioned in his script was that, approximately 60% of our VAS revenue is network-linked.

Right.

If your question is, how does acquisitions and dispositions impact that? Well, the reality is a lot of the acquisitions, which are there, if they're in the security space, tend to be network-linked, for the most part.

As we do more; and we start to roll them out in the market; and drive the synergistic impact of that, you might see some level of proportionate increase in terms of the network-linked revenues, which are there.

But, that being said, the remaining 40% also continues to grow at a healthy clip. Just to be clear, right? Things we're doing, from a marketing-services standpoint, continues to be actually a key contributor to our VAS growth.

It's important, right, to actually keep in perspective that that balance of moving away from 60% is not going to change by one or two acquisitions. But there's a very deliberate and intended focus to make sure we've got good balance in terms of how our VAS revenues are generated.

If we can just add one more point on that? Take Recorded Future, for example. This is not necessarily network delivered on a standalone basis but through Mastercard Threat Intelligence, actually, it is.

Here, the key point is, when we make an acquisition, what we oftentimes try to do is use the network. That is one option. Sachin just touched on that.

But there are the products that we sell in a one-on-one engagement or through distribution partners. But they still benefit from Mastercard's unique features, mostly through our data.

We bring together the data of the respective acquisition with our data. That makes a huge difference in terms of this is not just us inserting the company and having some sales synergies. We have more structural synergies out of that. That's generally the target that we're looking for.

James Faucette, Morgan Stanley.

Thank you very much.

I wanted to circle back to the open standard and that initiative. One of the questions we've gotten a lot from investors is how we should think about the governance; and governance and development roadmap there; and what kinds of initial use cases we should anticipate and think about, as that moves forward?

Thanks.

Open Standard, living up to the name: open. Here's a set of company -- 140-plus companies -- that have come together to create a consortium that facilitates the Open USD coin, which has a couple of aspects to it.

It's a neutral-market utility. It's with a focus on value exchange and payments. It's a governance structure that is fairly straightforward with these companies around the table.

Obviously, not every 140 participants will have a very specific say on that. Otherwise, we wouldn't move anything forward.

This is what is currently being played out in more detail. But, broadly speaking, the focus will be on payment use cases. It will be ensuring that the economics can be distributed and everybody can participate.

Those are some of the underlying unique features of that. Hence, we've seen all of the interest.

For us, this is important. But it's not the only thing that we're doing. The key point -- and I said it in my prepared remarks -- is this will be one coin that we will enable on our network. We will enable other coins.

We are working with USDC today, USDG, and so forth. Choice has always been a key criteria and will be the same here in stablecoins.

Going forward, important initiative. We're happy we're part of that from the beginning. But we will engage with various other stablecoin consortia around the world; ensure choice and a balanced market.

One last question, Julianne.

Certainly.

Matthew O'Neill, Bank of America.

Yeah. Hi. Thanks so much. Congrats, again, Sachin. Maybe, a couple housekeeping questions just to round out after a lot of good thematic ones:

Anything to call out or point to with respect to the rebates and incentive trend as a percent of gross payments revenue through the back half of the year? Obviously, this one's relatively hard to predict and sometimes lumpy.

Along those lines, anything that we should prep for with respect to the timing or impact of the BVNK deal closure through the back half of the year, as well?

Thanks so much.

Sure. First, on your question on rebates and incentives, for Q2, our rebates and incentives actually came in pretty much in line with what our expectations were. That's pretty much on point.

As it relates to Q3, we expect that our rebates and incentives as a percentage of our Payment Network assessments will be slightly higher than it was in Q2.

Look, at the end of the day, like you said, it's hard to predict because it's largely based on timing of deals; and deal performance; and things of that sort.

But, all of that being said, at the end of the day, what we're most focused on is making sure that we've got a rich pipeline of deals and that we are executing on the same, which is where we are, right now.

We have a rich pipeline. We're executing on that pipeline. It's in that vein that I've shared this third-quarter outlook for where I see rebates and incentives.

As it relates to the BVNK closure, as Michael mentioned, we expect the acquisition to close in Q3. That is contemplated in what we've shared with you in our recs with the materials, which are posted today.

You can see the impact come through -- minimal impact, from a net-revenue standpoint. There's some impact from an operating-expense standpoint. But all of that's contemplated in what we've shared with you in our recs.

Michael, any closing comments?

I want to chime in.

Sachin, you got so many congratulation. I'll do it one more time: Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thanks for this last call.

Ling Hai, looking forward to working with you. Congrats to you, as well.

Thank you, Michael.

I'm very excited about the new job. I look forward to leading the next earnings call with you.

But, also, my gratitude to Sachin for being such a wonderful CFO.

For those of you on the call, for all the investors and analysts, I look forward to engaging more with all of you.

Thank you.

That leaves me to do one important thing and that is thank our employees around the world, who do everything and make everything happen that we just shared with you; and, also, to thank you for your trust and support of Mastercard.

Talk to you next quarter. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.