General Commentary & Highlights

• Visa and Mastercard both had another year of strong performance on the back of healthy growth in consumer spending and cross-border volumes.
• Cross-border continues to drive volume growth, though growth slowed from 22% to 16% for Visa and 31% to 18% for Mastercard between Dec.’22-23 and Dec.’21-22, respectively.
  Visa and Mastercard card counts grew 6% and 9% respectively. Average spend per card also grew 2% for both companies after experiencing declines between Dec.’21-22 (-5% and -1%, respectively).
• Visa and Mastercard revenue grew 9% and 13% Q/Q, respectively. Both companies continue attributing success to cross-border spending, but cross-border revenue growth slowed. International transaction revenue growth for Visa and cross-border revenue growth for Mastercard slowed from 29% to 8% and 30% to 23% between Dec.’22-23 and Dec.’21-22 for each company, respectively.
• Client incentives continue growing faster than net revenue on a dollar basis for both Visa and Mastercard. Visa’s client incentives as a % of GDV grew 12% Q/Q versus net revenue growth of 1%. Similarly, Mastercard’s client incentives as a % of GDV grew 8% versus net revenue growth of 1% over the same period.
• Key partnership wins and relationship expansions were a key talking point during earnings calls for both companies. Visa’s highlighted partnerships were heavily focused on fintechs (47% of logos mentioned), while Mastercard’s highlighted partnerships were more heavily focused on banks (50% of partnerships).
• Visa announced large strategic investments in payment processing (Prosa and Pismo) and A2A payments platform Form3. Mastercard’s investment activity was spread across a variety of payment use cases (international money transfer, open banking, cybersecurity, etc.)