Visa and Mastercard’s Q3 financial results are well covered elsewhere. At Business of Payments, we’re more interested in what the investor updates tell us about trends in the European market and the success (or otherwise) of new products.
Mastercard continues to outperform Visa in Europe although its pace of growth has moderated. The two schemes are now almost neck and neck. Mastercard’s merchant payment volume grew 26% in Q3 to $602m while Visa’s was up 20% to $637m. Total scheme volume was up 23% in dollar terms although this falls to 14% when calculated in euros. Overall ATV was steady at $36.24.
European politicians and regulators have long been worried about an over-reliance on US payment networks. The European Payments Initiative and the Digital Euro are two of the latest responses. Asked about the threat of protectionism, Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s CEO was adamant that his business would always have a role in any payment ecosystem saying. “We’re seen as a technology company, a global technology company, not necessarily as a US payment brand.” That’s a bold statement and one which does not align with current sentiment at the European Central Bank and elsewhere. Dependence on foreign owned payment systems is a risk for any jurisdiction.
Last week, Worldline’s profits warning highlighted weakening European payment volumes, especially in Germany but Miebach said he saw no slowdown. “Consumer spending remains pretty steady in Germany and generally in Europe…. So Europe’s been a bright star, continues to be for us. So we don’t quite relate to what others are reporting.”
Portfolio wins
The deceleration in Mastercard’s European volume growth is primarily due to the removal of the NatWest portfolio win (16m cards) from the annual comparisons. But Mastercard has continued to win new card portfolios including 10m Deutsche Bank cards and 20m from UniCredit. Miebach said the Deutsch Bank conversion “has already started. It’s a combination of debit and credit. It will happen over an extended period of time. It’s not a flip-the-switch kind of scenario.”
Mastercard is also working with issuers to migrate more than 100m Maestro cards (mainly in Germany and the Netherlands) to its own-brand debit product. This is good news for consumers as their cards will now work online. It’s less good news for merchants who will be faced with higher transaction charges.
Visa is also positive about Europe, remarking that it has opened seven new locations over the last five years and more than doubled its workforce. Visa claims more than 100 relationships with European fintechs and even bought two of them – Tink (open banking) and CurrencyCloud (cross-border money transfers).
Excluding Maestro, the total number of Mastercards in Europe rose 13% increase to 796m. Visa did not publish numbers for card this quarter but reported that, excluding the UK, the number of active Visa cards in Europe is up 50% since 2019. Including the UK, where it has lost one third of the debit market to Mastercard, the figures would not seem so pretty. However, Visa’s management says it expects to migrate 40m cards from 40 issuing clients in Europe over next few years. The company says that these incomings portfolios are skewed to high margin cross-border transactions.
Tokenised transactions
Increasingly, cards are tokenised which means that the fraud-prone 16 digit PAN is not included in the transaction data. Visa processed 14bn tokenised transactions worldwide in Q3, up 60% year on year. Tokens make card transactions significantly more secure, and this means that issuers are much less likely to block them. This is very good news for merchants. Ryan McInerney, Visa’s CEO, said “we’re seeing, on average, somewhere between 4% and 5% higher approval rates across our partners. And we also see it with a reduction in fraud — a 30% reduction in fraud.”
Mastercard reported “the number of tokenized transactions has more than doubled over the past two years. We just processed over three billion tokenized transactions in one month.” Management highlighted the importance of tokens in allowing Mercedes-Benz customers in Germany to “pay for fuel directly from their vehicle using only their fingerprint.”
Open banking
Although Visa was blocked from buying Plaid, an open banking leader in the US, it was able to acquire Tink, a similar business HQ’d in Sweden. Management said that Tink “continues to perform very well in Europe…and we look forward to the opportunity to bring Tink outside of Europe.”
Mastercard has acquired Token, another European open banking provider. Questioned about the commercial model for the schemes to enter open banking, Mastercard’s Miebach said “We’re putting in our open banking connection to make it clear is there a balance on the account. It’s called the payment success indicator. That is the product. And it is a per-click fee related to the API call. So that is the model.”
Contactless
Mastercard says contactless now represents 63% of face-to-face transactions globally. Miebach explained why mass transit was so important. “By converting transit to Open-Loop, we gain access to more low-ticket, high-frequency transactions, both at the station and the surrounding merchants.”
Visa reports 76% of all F2F transactions outside the US are contactless, up 5ppts. The US is growing more quickly, albeit from a lower base. Contactless share was up 13ppts to 40%. Rapid transit is driving adoption worldwide. Visa says it enabled 150 new transit systems for contactless, taking the global total to 750. Impressively, 40% of these new customers are using Cybersource, Visa’s in-house acceptance solution, as their payment gateway.
Gateways
Cybersource seems to be out-performing Mastercard Gateway Services, its direct competitor. Cybersource attracted 2,600 additional customers in 100 countries in Q3. McInerney put its success down to investments in omni-channel, tokenisation (vital for mass transit) and fraud prevention capabilities.
Both schemes have products that allow money to be sent to one of their cards. Visa reported 7.5bn Visa Direct transactions globally in Q3 up 19%. In Europe, it is supported by 1000 programmes managed by 100 Visa partners. McInerney said Visa Direct is “focused on bill payments, on earned wage access, on insurance disbursements, on P2P more broadly in new geographies around the world, both domestic and cross-border.”
