Mastercard vs. Visa: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Performance

Hey Payments Fanatic!

I'll keep it short. Had my focus on the big game today.

Cheers,

Marcel

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INSIGHTS

Mastercard 🆚 Visa

A Comparison of Key Metrics in the Latest Income Statements:

PAYMENTS NEWS

🇨🇳 Thunes powers LianLian global’s new payment service. This collaboration demonstrates Thunes’ commitment to support the growth of Chinese e-commerce and simplify cross-border payments internationally. LianLian Global Payout Service addresses the challenges of traditional cross-border payments, such as high costs, slow processing times and complex procedures. 

🇸🇬 Fave Singapore gets in-principle approval for payments license. This approval allows Fave to offer account issuance, merchant acquisition, and domestic money transfer services. The company plans to continue rolling out innovative commerce products in partnership with Pine Labs.

🇬🇧 Payabl. appoints Esfira Zakas as Chief Marketing Officer. Esfira has been promoted from Head of Marketing into the new role, evidencing payabl.’s commitment to leveraging internal talent and fostering inclusive leadership. Read more

🏴 Payment orchestration provider BR-DGE has announced the launch of its white-label payment orchestration solution, which is set to propel payment acquirers, gateways, platforms and other ecosystem players with agile and customisable modular tech to stand out in a fiercely competitive market. 

🇮🇱 Wix adds new features allowing merchants to customize checkout forms. The new features let merchants add custom fields to the checkout form, customize field layouts, and adjust settings such as descriptions, mandatory status, and PII requirements, according to the email.

🇪🇬 enza and TerraPay announce a partnership to transform the payments landscape in Africa.  By partnering, the organisations aim to tackle two problems that have inhibited the growth of businesses across Africa, and in doing so accelerate financial inclusion.

🇵🇪 Fintech Minka partners with Gmoney and Globokas to expand instant payments in Peru. This new alliance is created to impact a market that today moves more than 390 billion dollars a year according to the latest report from the Central Reserve Bank of Peru.

GOLDEN NUGGET

Tokenization 201:

Tokenization in Payments 201 — how the evolution of Tokens is impacting Payments & enabling a Multi-Processor model 👇

Refresher on Payment Tokens 💯

‣ 𝗔𝗰𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀

‣ 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀

‣ 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀

‣ 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀

‣ 𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀

3rd-party providers — VGS, Basis Theory, Spreedly — are able to generate agnostic tokens interoperable across channels & providers

PAN vs BIN Lookup:

🔸PAN — Primary Account Number — a unique 16-digit number on a payment card. It identifies the cards origin (issuer), type of card (credit, debit, prepaid...), card brand (Visa, Mastercard..), etc.

🔸BIN — Bank Identification Number — first 6-8 digits of a payment card's. It identifies the institution that issued the card.

👉 Merchants historically worked with a 6-digit BIN Lookup & built sophisticated BIN mapping logic. Card-Not-Present (CNP) Merchants would often store cards in a 6+4 format (6-digit BIN & 4-digit personal identifier).

🚨Major Industry Change — Issuers are moving to 8-digit+ BIN making the existing 6-digit lookup no longer efficient. The data stored will no longer be actionable creating a major issue for merchants to process payments.

To stay relevant, opting for a PAN Lookup will maximize the card attributes merchants get access to, impacting decisions on currency, exchange rates, debit routing networks & more.

Apple introduced Merchant Tokens (MPAN) 👇

Traditionally, after cardholder verification, a device-specific network token (DPAN) replaces the customer's Primary Account Number (PAN) in Apple Wallet.

This DPAN makes transactions secure, as it's bound to the device and unusable if stolen.

However, drawbacks include the need for a new DPAN when changing devices and the issuance of multiple DPANs across different devices.

𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝘀 (𝗠𝗣𝗔𝗡) are not device-bound but linked to the user's iCloud, facilitating device changes without affecting the token.

🚨 Visa announced a mandate for merchants to use MPAN instead of DPAN for Standing Instruction transactions starting July 30 2025 making Apple and other merchants switch their tokens.

How Tokenization Enables a Multi-Processor Model - VGS x RoadSync 👇

RoadSync maintained a seamless payment processing experience with their PSP. Unfortunately, s**t happens & SVB collapses impacting its payment processing abilities.

The inclusion of an agile & flexible tokenization provider (VGS) & cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services (AWS) enabled RoadSync to switch payment providers over a single weekend. The infrastructure displayed in the diagram below 👇

Ultimately, tokenization is a core element of a flexible payment infrastructure. Think carefully about it, you never know what can happen 🚀

Source: VGS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple & RoadSync 👋

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