Mastercard

“Visa and MasterCard have a hard two and a half second limit on interaction between the network issuing bank and the merchant and the acquiring bank.”

“That's why Starbucks invented Starbucks Pay, because they wanted to stop having to pay. It's like these prepaid, they only have to pay one time. You chart, you put 50 dollars on your Starbucks account, well, they only have to pay Visa, MasterCard, and everybod…”

“I'm spending a lot of time with, you know, Shopify you know, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express you know, Intuit, the companies that actually deal with these small businesses and saying, how can we bring together the tools in order to make sure that th…”

“And so the Visa brand and MasterCard brands are much more than just a payment rail. They're this consumer warm blanket that created e-commerce. Without those brands, you'd never enter your dark card and have Amazon ship your product.”

“It may be lower costs, but I would argue Visa and MasterCard can make the cost practically zero if they wanted to, but their brands offer much more value than just pushing money to someone.”

“We created a company to do that, and MasterCard came and bought it. This was in 2013. And then all of our customers, and we had good customers, actually, back then Stripe and Lyft were a customer, and we did a lot of payouts to Lyft for Stripe. Ticketmaster wa…”

“What is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.”

“And then from there, I had a chance to be one of the candidates to be the next CEO of Citi, which was 250,000 people. And I quit and became the CEO of Mastercard with 4000 people. But when I left, Mastercard's market cap was three hundred sixty billion, and ci…”

“Even when I was at MasterCard, by the time I left, you know, more than half our code was being written through machines.”

“After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the three percent interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stablecoins, all the financial stocks got hit on Monday. Amex down eight percent, Capital One down eigh…”

“Where the crazy abuse is, is all the middlemen in those transactions. So Visa and MasterCard, they don't really abuse the merchant, but the abuse happens with all their partners. Like the independent sales organizations that work for the banks that work for Vi…”

“We function kind of like in the credit card industry, kind of like a visa and mastercard. They are not the brand that gives you the credit card and they're not the folks you buy stuff from.”

“What we're specialized in, in a category of our own, is helping Fortune 500, Fortune 100 consumer and B to B brands embed insurance. And so we've done that with some of the biggest brands in the world, folks like Tesla, Toyota, Better.com, MasterCard, Intuit”

“My, like contrary opinion is that I think Visa and MasterCard are more technology companies, and if you look at their, like, profit margin on the gross payment volume, it's like 10 basis points. It's like vapor. I think the issuer and receiver bank, those are …”

“As part of Aadhaar, today we have UPI, which takes away the need for Visa and MasterCard, so it's a three percent tax on the economy that Indians don't pay, but everybody in the U.S. Pays.”

“The first one that comes to mind is Capital One and Discover. Huge deal. This is not a tuck in. This like materially changes their whole business model. And the reason is because it creates the largest credit card issuer by loan volume, because it allows Capit…”

“There's about two trillion dollars of us commercial corporate card spent. And so what that represents is the top 100 issuing banks on MasterCard and Visa plus Amex commercial card volume is around two trillion a year.”

“So we got the investment the day after that. And then obviously you know, Sequoia and then Mastercard also came in with the, with Tencent.”

“And Mastercard supposed to give us a billion dollar volume from the Mastercard same product, but we got less than a million dollar.”

“We have done the opposite and it has meant deliberate and significant investments in building out our own infrastructure. That means our own cloud-based Core banking system, our own ledger, our own proprietary card processing and issuing platform, getting a di…”

“If you use a Visa MasterCard, the US government will potentially have strings that they can use to control one day, perhaps even shut the system down if needed.”

“The fact is that when your economy is reliant on Visa MasterCard, you're paying a one person tax to a third country, right?”

“I mean, we owned both those companies at their IPOs and had meaningful positions and, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, never should have sold.”

“If you look at the largest payment systems globally, whether it is Visa or MasterCard or American Express in the US, or whether it is Alipay in China, they have a substantial, if not majority credit component. In India, UPI is massive, but it's debit only. So …”

“When we think about things in financial services, big invoice reconciliation, bill pay, you'll have these things come in as PDFs, you'll have them come in as images, you'll have them come in as text in a variety of ways. As we start looking at things holistica…”

“We've been using AI for decades. It's inherent in everything we do in fraud detection, right?”

“The product we have is called Decision Intelligence, and that's where in the milliseconds we have between when a transaction passes through our network from when you tap to buy something in a store, it passes through MasterCard to go to the issuer. We're provi…”

“In personalization, we have something called Shopping Muse, which is basically enabling the in-store experience online. So you have a chatbot effectively where you can type in your own language and ask for recommendations. ... It's allowing you to interact lik…”

“What we've done is we've created a digital assistant that uses RAG and points to all these technical databases, the Q and A's we've had over time, where we've tested and fine-tuned these models to enable customers to onboard our products easier by automating a…”

“When we presented to our board of directors on AI in September, the way we structured is I had seven external speakers come in, right? To give different perspectives from an investor perspective. The CEO of one of the leading LLMs. We partnered with Databricks…”

“There's enthusiasm, but I, it's definitely not unbridled as people are very worried about the accuracy, the hallucination, the efficacy of these, and particularly as you start pointing these to customer facing solutions, there's a very high bar on what that's …”

“There's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and MasterCard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total. Like they're over 60%.”

“Our headline rate at the end was one percent transaction fee, which you compare that to a Visa MasterCard product that merchants pay, you know, three plus if you're on Stripe. Maybe you're on world pay or somebody like that and get a better rate, but our cost …”

“The way we build our financial infrastructure, we don't rely on Stripe, on Marketo, or any of these vendors. We literally go straight to the metal and do the money movement directly with MasterCard and local payment rails.”

“We spent so much time in the early years building our whole financial infrastructure from the ground up, like down to the way we talk to MasterCard, down to the way we move money on ACH, down to the way we do, you know, global money movements, settlements, eff…”

“There's 14, there's 14 companies in the S&P 500 that are bigger than the market cap that was raised in three days. That's it. Only 14 companies are more than four to thirty billion dollars. That's as big as MasterCard and it did it in three days.”

“It's been like a nice debate, and then at the end, Visa and MasterCard win. So but so I think that's what I read into the settlement”

“The size of the market, I think MasterCard's paid it at 125 trillion dollars annually, which is four times the size of the consumer driven B to B to C market where global payments historically had competed.”

“And so what Bill Ackman does is he goes and he immediately texts the CEO of Visa, and he sends him the article. He's like, your company is enabling this. These guys are making money off of this. You better do something about this. And the CEO of Visa is like, …”

“Those pretty quickly all merge into a national association called Interbank, which, spoiler alert, Interbank is MasterCard.”

“Anytime that you have something that's more distributed, you're going to be compromising a little bit on the user experience because you can't sort of rule by fiat when you want to make a change, but it does potentially come with much better scalability, which…”

“At the end of the day, Visa and MasterCard have basically no sustainable competitive advantage over each other.”

“The first one is, this business is a toll booth, and toll booths make for great businesses, especially when everyone has to drive on your road or the road next to yours, and both of them charge the same toll.”

“The Bank AmeriCard credit card by Bank of America runs on MasterCard's network.”

“MasterCard and they're spending me a hundred, you know, they're spending a 150,000 bucks to have me speak for an hour in Barcelona, which I did last week”

“So you think of like Visa or a MasterCard or Market access or trade web or something. These companies are, it's gonna be 30 years where they're gonna continue growing, and that growth, it's all inside the moat.”

“The reason we raised money was to create aligned long-term incentives with all of our partners. And so all of the money we raised was from real estate owners, the banks that we work with, Wells Fargo, Mastercar, the payment networks, And that was it.”

“So fintech, like UPI and, you know, everything else that India has developed, I think is amazing. We're already integrating with the Singapore and Middle East, and so I think that is a welcome change. It will disrupt Visa, MasterCard, you know, all of these.”

“No, it's certainly not three to five percent, right? ... It's much less, right? If you look on the payment space, right? When a merchant is typically paying in the U S somewhere between 1.6 to A critical transaction, right? This cost would include the issuing …”

“Visa and MasterCard, I think are doing the single dumbest thing they could do by being a duopoly, which is raising prices, especially into an inflationary moment, which just lacks complete knowledge and sensitivity of the moment.”

“My biggest business loser for 20, 22 is Visa and MasterCard and traditional payment rails and the entire ecosystem around it.”

“So in 2007, the first time Morningstar had actually done a pre IPO analysis of a company was Mastercard. And I was pegged to cover Mastercard before there was any price on the stock. Morningstar usually had publicly available prices. So this was a first buildi…”

“The problem that we've had over the last 10 years is that everyone's been building their own authentication and their own payment forms and their own registration forms, and they're doing it first party, which is a terrible experience for consumers, right? Rep…”

“So if there's a hundred dollars that goes to the system, in a simple example the merchant might pay three dollars. That three dollars, you know, 99% of it is going to the issuing banks, to the banks, into the card schemes. We get a tiny, tiny percent of that, …”

“He was gonna, he's, you know, said right out of the gate, oh, we're gonna take down Visa and MasterCard.”

“We took the step to integrate directly with Visa MasterCard, really replacing the banks, the processing systems, and really, yeah, trying to eliminate the role banks play in payment handling, by going directly to these Visa MasterCard networks.”

“If you submit a payment to Visa MasterCard, it's not just a card number and a name. No, we submit over a hundred data points.”

“Making small tweaks to that suddenly changed the responses. So we were seeing two, three percent more approval rates.”

“I probably won't make an investment in either of those, though our portfolio companies, whether it's MasterCard using blockchain technology, Or Wells Fargo using blockchain technology. Our portfolio companies will be involved.”

“Essentially in our business, because we're paying out to Visa and MasterCard and Amex on our payments revenue, It's important to not look at the gross revenue, but instead to the net, right? And to like take lifetime times by your net revenue to get a true vie…”