How nonpayments became big business at Visa and Mastercard

• Key insights: Value-added services such as security, marketing and consulting have become a major part of Visa and Mastercard's revenue. 
• What's at stake: Rival fintechs and regulatory moves are pressuring revenue from card payments. 
• Forward look: Visa and Mastercard plan to expand many of their recent moves to global markets in the next year. 

Visa and Mastercard ended 2025 with a series of partnership deals with third parties to support mobile wallets around the world. The partnerships were partly designed to take advantage of regulatory pressure on Apple over the technology giant's control over mobile payments. But the card networks are facing pressure of their own through regulatory scrutiny, legal battles with merchants over fees and the growth  of card alternatives, forcing the companies to find other ways to make money. "Partnerships aren't just important; they're essential to Mastercard's strategy," Eimear Creaven, president of global partnerships at Mastercard, told American Banker. "In a world of evolving payment models, rapid tech advances, regulatory shifts and changing consumer expectations, collaboration with fintech, big tech and traditional financial institutions lets us connect cards, accounts, wallets and real-time rails."

A world of opportunity

Value-added services use Visa and Mastercard's scale with merchants and banks as a market for the nonpayment products that the card networks sell.

"We like the networks' VAS offerings because they allow the companies to be more competitive on some issuer business while preserving pricing power. If Mastercard and Visa simply sold on their respective network value, we contend the market would be more price competitive and some issuers (and acquirers) might choose to purchase services from third parties," analysts from William Blair said in a note. "By bundling these solutions, we contend the networks embed themselves with global issuers and boost yield."

For Mastercard, value-added services include technology, data and consulting covering fraud prevention, cybersecurity, credit management, marketing, open banking, real-time payments and data management. Mastercard's network includes more than 220 countries, 150 million merchant locations and 3.5 billion cards. 

Mastercard's recent value-added services include the Mastercard Mid-Market Accelerator, a suite of small and medium-size business products that are designed for card issuers. The accelerator bundles Mastercard's digital-payments technology with the card brand's value-added products. In the most recent quarter, Mastercard's value-added net revenue was $3.4 billion, up 25% from the prior year and about 40% of the card brand's total revenue. 

Mastercard calls the strategy a virtuous cycle. "Those services make payments better," Creaven said. "That drives more flows, richer data and even stronger solutions."

Visa's value-added services totaled $17.5 billion in revenue during fiscal 2025, up 9% from the prior year  (out of $40 billion in total revenue). The card brand has more than 650 partners in its services unit, according to Visa.

Visa recently upgraded Authorize.net, a service that helps businesses analyze data to more quickly respond to consumer trends. The card brand added more AI models and support for in-person card readers and Tap to Phone, or technology that enables smartphones to accept payments with minimal hardware upgrades. These upgrades have launched in the U.S. and are scheduled to be introduced internationally in 2026. Visa also released a "unified checkout service, which combines payment acceptance with other functions such as fraud management, authentication and token management (token in this case refers to substitute values for card numbers as a security measure, and is not related to cryptocurrency). 

In another move, the card brand used its acquisition of AI firm Featurespace to build a risk hub, a security tool that uses Featurespace's technology to identify risky transactions and build profiles around valid customer activity to reduce the time required to vet transactions. 

And a December deal with payment fintech MassPay will integrate Visa Direct to support faster payouts to cards, bank accounts and digital wallets through MassPay's payment orchestration platform, which routes transactions to the best possible option based on speed and expense. 

Visa's MassPay collaboration is aimed at businesses that need to pay people across borders, such as gig workers, marketplace sellers or independent contractors.

"Enabler partnerships are one of the engines and growth levers behind Visa Direct's global expansion," Vira Platonova, global head of Visa Direct, told American Banker. The card network's transfer service, Visa Direct, connects to more than 12 billion endpoints across cards, accounts and wallets in more than 195 countries and 150-plus currencies, according to Visa. 

"Every integration, whether with a bank, fintech or payout platform, does more than add endpoints; it expands choice and flexibility for clients and consumers." Platonova said. 

Riding the rails

While payment fintechs such as PayPal, Block and Stripe offer products for both consumers and merchants, Visa and Mastercard's networks are much larger. 

"They own the payment rails that have a ton of volume on them but a lot of alternative rails have become viable, so in order to maintain their position as primary rails for most payments they're going to continue to partner with as many folks to create as many on ramps to their card networks as possible," Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker. "It benefits them to create as many connections as possible, not only to displace new providers but also to grow their revenue at a very low marginal cost." 

For Visa and Mastercard, "value-added services, propelled by ongoing expansion of capabilities associated with fraud protection, and potential initial contribution from agentic commerce and stablecoin volumes, should continue growing faster than the overall businesses," according to an analyst report from Morgan Stanley. The firm projects Visa and Mastercard's value-added services growth in the high teens to low 20s in 2026 – compared to low teens overall for both Visa and Mastercard. This will improve investor confidence in Visa and Mastercard's overall growth, especially as payment-volume growth slows in the U.S. and other mature markets, according to Morgan Stanley.