Aug. 15, 2026

Mastercard goes beyond the credit card

Mastercard (MA +0.40%) stock is up 27% per year since its initial public offering (IPO) in 2006. That's an increase of over 130x in value, turning $10,000 into $1.3 million.

This month, Tom Gardner talked with Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach about the company's future.

Key quotes from Mastercard's CEO

On cybersecurity

• "By 2030, the amount of fraud and cyber risk-driven damage is going to amount to $15.6 trillion. If cyber risk were a country, that would be the third largest economy in the world."
• "What we essentially need to do is move from defense to offense. And that's where our last investments have been in threat intelligence."

On Mastercard's role in the global market

• "We're the operating system of the digital economy. An operating system should have a security layer. That's exactly what we do. But it also has a money movement layer--across stablecoins and account-to-account and cards. We move value, your hard-earned money."

On stablecoins

• "You're company A, I'm company B, and we just want to do machine-to-machine payments with each other. But your choice is stablecoin A and my choice is stablecoin B. Who sits in the middle and drives interoperability, makes sure all of this connects and is not a plate full of spaghetti? Mastercard's."
• "It is really not needed for anybody to go and buy their coffee at the local coffee shop with a stablecoin. So why would you do that? There is no problem to solve...It's never about the technology, it's about whose problem can we solve."

On agentic commerce

• "Agent pay, stablecoins, agentic commerce -- this is a whole new way of doing commerce going forward."
• "The underlying rails and infrastructure are likely to be different than card rails. It could be stablecoin, it could be other rails. That is essentially going to come down to the choices of companies and what they want to use. We're pretty agnostic about that -- but the protocol to keep the trust, an interoperable layer on top, is critical."
• "Imagine the digital content that a company is buying. That could be APIs, digital content, data, compute power. Why would you send an invoice and do that? You will want to do this as you use your compute power. I need 10% more, you dial it up, you dial it down, and you pay as you need. If you pay as you need, your working capital efficiency is going to dramatically increase."

Your Take

Will Mastercard beat the market over the next five years? Why, why not?