NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, September 11, 2015

During MasterCard’s Investment Community Meeting on Wednesday (Sept. 9), the remarks from CEO Ajay Banga and his executive team gave a pretty good indication into how MasterCard views its role in the fast-moving digital payments ecosystem.

Starting with his “three concentric circles” theme (to underscore the core value of MasterCard) as he does at similar meetings, Banga kicked off his comments by focusing on electronic payments in general.

“There are certain sets of strategies you can take to [grow the share of electronic payments], from working on acceptance from trying to get after the kinds of payments that have traditionally been in cash, be there very small, low-value payments in the more developed countries in payments or be there also the larger, high-value payments, like college fees and the like, which tend to go outside of the traditional electronic payment system. So, there’s work to do there.”

That led him to jump into financial inclusion and where MasterCard plays a role in that arena.

“There’s always work to do as well in financial inclusion. And that’s something you’ll see us talk about periodically, but there’s now still 2 billion adults who don’t have access to any form of an account and therefore no way for them to participate in the marketplace, which we think could be continuously driving our growth for many years to come,” Banga commented.

“And so [a] certain amount of our energy and efforts is spent on being a leader in the states of financial inclusion, just purely to make sure that that pie keeps growing but also to make sure that governments view us in a form as being helpful to being a part of their transformation of their country and their economy.”