Mastercard's Stronger Growth Story Outpaces Visa in Q3

Mastercard and Visa recently closed their latest quarters on July 28 and July 30. The reports highlight two different growth stories for the payment giants.

Visa's net revenue grew 14.4% to $11.63 billion, with data processing revenue increasing by 17%. The company processed $72 billion transactions and pushed quarterly payments volume past $4 trillion for the first time.

Mastercard, on the other hand, showed stronger growth in net income, rising nearly three times faster than Visa at 19% vs 7%, while expanding adjusted operating margins to 61.1%. The company's value-added services and solutions revenue grew by 20%.

The two companies are pursuing agentic commerce differently. Visa is restructuring its engineering into small AI-native squads, cutting requirement definition from 30 days to 5 days and shipping more than 300 major product releases in a year. Mastercard, however, is buying its way in with the acquisition of BVNK for stablecoin infrastructure and launching Agent Pay for machine-to-machine transactions.

Mastercard's stock has diverged sharply from Visa's, with Mastercard sitting at -0.18% year-to-date while Visa is up 4.82%. Investors are paying for Visa's cash return velocity: $4.9 billion in buybacks last quarter plus $1.3 billion in dividends.