Deep Dive: Mastercard’s Value-Added Services & Solutions

Most people still think Mastercard makes money by simply moving transactions across a card network.

That view is outdated.

Today, nearly 40% of Mastercard’s revenue comes from value-added services, not card swipes. In the last quarter alone, these services generated $3.4B in revenue, growing at 25% year over year, more than double the growth of the core network.

In this video, I break down:

• What Mastercard’s value-added services actually are

• Why fraud, data, open banking, loyalty, and analytics scale faster than payments

• How Mastercard’s data flywheel turns transactions into high-margin software

• Why these services make the network harder to replace

• How Mastercard is positioning itself beyond cards into real-time payments, open banking, crypto, and agentic commerce

This is not a side business. It is a structurally embedded fintech platform built on data, APIs, and distribution.

If you are building in fintech, payments, or embedded finance, this is a critical benchmark for how modern financial infrastructure companies scale.