Mastercard today reported net revenue of $9.8 billion for the third quarter of 2026, up 14% from $8.6 billion a year earlier, as its value-added services and solutions business grew 19% to $4.06 billion and passed 41% of the company's revenue. Net income rose 18% to $4.6 billion and diluted earnings per share climbed 22% to $5.28. The results, published together with the company's quarterly report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, also show cross-border card-not-present spending outside travel growing 15%, down from 20% in the second quarter, and they contain no revenue figure for the advertising and marketing services Mastercard sells to brands.

In Short

Mastercard runs the network that moves money between a shopper's bank and a store's bank, and between July and September 2026 it took in 14% more revenue than a year before, with the extra services it sells on top of that network growing fastest. Spending by people buying online from shops in other countries kept growing, but more slowly than in the spring, which matters to any business that sells across borders. Mastercard also sells marketing built on payment data and is building payment tools for AI shopping assistants, yet its results do not say how much money either of those brings in.

The quarter in numbers

Revenue growth was the same on a reported and a currency-neutral basis, so exchange rates had little net effect on the quarter's top line. Net revenue was $9,807 million against $8,602 million in the third quarter of 2025, according to the earnings release. Operating expenses rose 11% to $3,945 million, leaving operating income 16% higher at $5,862 million and the operating margin at 59.8%, up from 58.8%.

On Mastercard's adjusted basis, which strips out gains and losses on equity investments and items the company classes as special, net income was $4,653 million, up 17% (18% currency-neutral), and adjusted diluted earnings per share were $5.31 against $4.38, an increase of 21%. The adjusted operating margin was 60.5%, compared with 59.8%. The quarter's adjustments were modest: $74 million of litigation provisions, "primarily due to settlements with merchants who opted out of the U.S. merchant class litigation," and a $5 million net loss on equity investments.

Two items below the operating line moved the result. The effective tax rate fell to 19.4% from 21.5%, which Mastercard attributes to "higher net discrete tax benefits and other tax impacts in 2026." And the diluted share count dropped 3% to 876 million from 905 million, the cumulative effect of share repurchases, so earnings per share grew four percentage points faster than net income.

Michael Miebach, Mastercard's chief executive, framed the quarter around reach and new products. "Another strong quarter for Mastercard, delivering net revenue growth of 14%. More Mastercard credentials in more hands give us a powerful foundation, backed by our global reach and innovation. From advancing Agentic Commerce to our new Global Money Platform through BVNK, we're shaping how people pay, manage and exchange across currencies. We're not waiting for the future of commerce. We're building it," Miebach said in the release.

The operating drivers behind those words were steady rather than spectacular. Gross dollar volume, the total spent and withdrawn on Mastercard-branded cards, grew 7% on a local currency basis to $2.95 trillion, a figure the release rounds to $3.0 trillion. Purchase volume rose 9%, cross-border volume 11% and switched transactions, the number of transactions Mastercard itself routes, 9% to 49.3 billion. Customers had issued 3.8 billion Mastercard and Maestro-branded cards by September 30.

Over nine months, net revenue reached $27.5 billion, up 15% (13% currency-neutral), and net income $12.9 billion, up 18%. Diluted earnings per share were $14.59, against $12.00; the adjusted figure was $14.94, against $12.25. The nine-month numbers carry a $202 million restructuring charge taken in the first quarter, which Mastercard says was "primarily intended to enable reinvestment to support the realization of our long-term growth opportunities."

By geography, the 10-Q shows revenue from the Americas, which covers the United States, Canada and Latin America, at $4,190 million, against $3,651 million, and revenue from Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa at $5,617 million, against $4,951 million. By PPC Land's arithmetic, that is growth of about 15% and 13% respectively.

Value-added services pass 41% of revenue

Mastercard reports two revenue lines. The payment network line covers what it charges for running card transactions. The value-added services and solutions line covers everything else it sells. In the third quarter the second line grew 19%, on both a reported and currency-neutral basis, to $4,058 million from $3,423 million. The release attributes the increase to "our underlying key drivers, strong demand across several of our services, and pricing," and says it includes "a minimal decrease from acquisitions and dispositions."

The mix is shifting quickly. By PPC Land's calculation, value-added services made up 41.4% of net revenue in the quarter, against 39.8% a year earlier. In absolute terms, the services line added $635 million of revenue year over year, while the payment network added $570 million - so services supplied about 53% of the $1.2 billion increase in total revenue. Over nine months, services revenue was $11,334 million, up 20% (18% currency-neutral), or 41.2% of the total compared with 39.3% in the same period of 2025.

What sits inside that line? The quarterly documents do not say. There is no breakdown by product, no figure for fraud and security tools, data analytics, loyalty programmes, consulting or advertising, and no list of the "several" services where Mastercard saw strong demand. The company reports a single operating segment, "Payment Solutions," so investors and advertisers get one number for a business that now brings in more than $4 billion a quarter.

Where marketing services appear

Marketing services surface in the 10-Q once, and as a cost. General and administrative expenses rose 13% to $3,293 million, "primarily due to higher personnel and data processing costs to support the continued investment in our strategic initiatives across payment network and value-added services and solutions, as well as fulfillment costs to deliver marketing services to our customers," according to the filing. The same phrase appears in the explanation for the nine-month increase.

Those fulfillment costs sit within an "other" category of general and administrative expenses that grew 22% to $675 million in the quarter. The segment note says that category "includes fulfillment costs, occupancy costs, travel and meeting expenses and other overhead expenses," without separating the pieces. Data processing and telecommunications costs grew 19% to $386 million, professional fees 27% to $162 million and personnel costs 7% to $2,028 million.

Mastercard has been selling marketing products to brands openly for at least a year. On October 1, 2025, Mastercard opened Mastercard Commerce Media, a network offering cashback, discounts and advertising across digital touchpoints, built on permissioned transaction data from more than 160 billion payments processed in 2024 and launched with 25,000 existing advertisers and 500 million enrolled consumers. Citi, WPP, Microsoft and American Airlines were named as partners, with Dynamic Yield and Mastercard Marketing Services supplying personalisation and media optimisation, and Mastercard said new distribution through point-of-sale systems and digital wallets was planned for 2026. None of those figures, and no update on that expansion, appears in today's results. Earlier, in June 2025, Comcast said it would combine Mastercard transaction records with its television viewing data to measure how TV advertising moves aggregated consumer spending.

Mastercard is not alone in keeping such figures out of its filings. PayPal's quarterly report, filed on October 27, contains no reference to PayPal Ads, the advertising unit PayPal has been building on its own purchase data since 2024. For buyers weighing commerce media budgets from payment companies, two of the best-known examples now share the same gap: product announcements, partner lists and audience claims, with no reported revenue.

The payment network and the rebate bill

Payment network revenue rose 11%, both reported and currency-neutral, to $5,749 million. The release lists four drivers: gross dollar volume growth of 7%, cross-border volume growth of 11%, switched transaction growth of 9%, and pricing.

The more striking figure is what Mastercard pays back. Rebates and incentives provided to customers reached $6,369 million in the quarter, up 18% from $5,389 million, "primarily due to an increase in our key drivers, as well as new and renewed deals," according to the release. That is more than the $5,749 million of net payment network revenue Mastercard kept.

The company publishes four "assessments," its standard pricing metrics for the network:

  • Domestic assessments: $3,211 million, up 14% (13% currency-neutral)
  • Cross-border assessments: $3,841 million, up 16%
  • Transaction processing assessments: $4,781 million, up 14%
  • Other network assessments: $285 million, up 10%

Added together, the four come to $12,118 million, and subtracting rebates and incentives gives exactly the $5,749 million of payment network revenue, by PPC Land's arithmetic. Mastercard cautions that "Assessments do not represent our net revenue" and describes them as an internal measure of operating performance. On that arithmetic, though, rebates and incentives equalled 52.6% of the assessment total, up from 51.0% a year earlier. The share of gross network pricing that flows back to customers is rising.

Assessments also grew faster than the activity behind them. Cross-border assessments rose 16% while cross-border volume rose 11%; transaction processing assessments rose 14% while switched transactions rose 9%. The filing names pricing among the drivers of payment network revenue but does not quantify it.

The cost of those customer deals is also visible on the balance sheet. Customer incentives recorded as assets totalled $11.6 billion at September 30 ($2,716 million current and $8,908 million non-current), up from $10.4 billion at the end of 2025. Amortization of customer incentives reached $2,030 million over nine months, a third more than the $1,526 million of a year earlier. Operating cash flow fell $787 million to $11,859 million despite higher profit, which the 10-Q attributes to "higher customer incentive payments, cash paid for litigation settlements and timing of settlements with customers."

Cross-border and card-not-present spending

Cross-border volume, spending on Mastercard-branded cards where the card's country of issue differs from the merchant's, grew 11% on a local currency basis and 10% in US dollars. On the local currency measure, that is the slowest pace in the nine quarters Mastercard publishes in its supplemental operating data. Growth was 17% in the third quarter of 2024 and 20% in the fourth, held at 15% through the first three quarters of 2025, then fell by one point in each of the last four quarters: 14%, 13%, 12% and 11%. The US dollar figure swings more with currencies; it was 21% in the first quarter of 2026 and 14% in the second.

The investor presentation splits that flow further, through October 21:

  • Cross-border card-not-present, excluding travel: 20% growth in the second quarter, 15% in each of July, August and September, and 14% in October to date
  • Cross-border travel, card-present and card-not-present: 6% in the second quarter, 8% in the third and 7% in October to date
  • Intra-Europe cross-border: 12% in the second quarter, 10% in the third and 8% in October to date
  • Other cross-border: 11% in the second quarter, 12% in the third and 12% in October to date

Card-not-present cross-border spending outside travel - purchases where the card is not physically presented to a merchant in another country, such as online orders from shops abroad - remains the fastest-growing cross-border category. But its growth rate dropped five percentage points between the second and third quarters and showed no recovery in the first three weeks of October. The documents give no explanation for the drop. They note that, from the second quarter of 2026, Mastercard's key drivers include Venezuela cross-border activity.

Travel moved the other way, accelerating from 6% to 8%. Intra-European flows slowed to their weakest rate in the table by October.

Cross-border assessments, the revenue metric most directly linked to this spending, still grew 16% to $3,841 million in the quarter and 20% to $10,491 million over nine months. They accounted for 31.7% of the four assessments combined, against 31.3% a year earlier, by PPC Land's calculation.

On domestic e-commerce, the documents are silent. Mastercard does not publish a domestic card-not-present figure or an online share of volume. The only other monthly gauge in the presentation is switched volume, which covers in-store and online activity alike; it grew 9% in the quarter, with September at 11% and October to date at 10%. In the United States, switched volume grew 9% in September and in October to date, after 6% in the second quarter, 6% in July and 5% in August.

Volumes by region and card type

Gross dollar volume was $867 billion in the United States, up 5.9%, and $2,084 billion elsewhere, up 8.1%, according to the operating performance tables. The detail inside those totals is uneven.

US credit up, US debit flat

In the United States, credit and charge programmes grew 10.1% to $467 billion, accelerating from 6.7% a year earlier. Debit and prepaid programmes grew 1.4% to $400 billion. US debit purchase transactions fell 0.1% to 7.11 billion, the only decline in purchase transactions for any programme in the table. The supplemental data shows when the slowdown began: US debit gross dollar volume growth was 6.7% in the third quarter of 2025, then 1.7%, 0.6%, 1.3% and 1.4% in the four quarters since. Mastercard's documents do not attribute it to any cause.

The card counts tell the same story. US Mastercard credit and charge cards grew 7.9% to 376 million; US debit and prepaid cards grew 2.0% to 371 million. In the third quarter of 2026, US credit and charge cards outnumbered debit cards for the first time in the nine quarters of data Mastercard published today. The documents do not link the credit acceleration to any particular portfolio. One large US credit programme is in transition: Mastercard remains the network for Apple Card through its move from Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase, a transition announced in January 2026 and expected to take about 24 months.

Europe slows, Latin America accelerates

Europe, Mastercard's largest region by volume, grew 8.3% in local currency to $1.06 trillion. A year earlier the rate was 11.5%; two years earlier it was 15.1%. European card growth slowed to 3.2%, from 9.4% a year earlier, for a base of 994 million cards.

Latin America moved the other way. Gross dollar volume rose 13.5% in local currency to $279 billion, or 21.6% in US dollars, purchase volume rose 16.1%, and the region's card base grew 19.1% to 627 million, the fastest of any region. That growth comes as account-to-account payments gain ground: in Brazil, Pix accounted for 42% of online purchase value in 2025 against 41% for cards, according to an EBANX report covered by PPC Land in February.

Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa grew 5.8% to $670 billion, with purchase transactions up 11.0% to 14.4 billion. Canada grew 7.6% to $75 billion.

Cash and Maestro

Cash keeps shrinking as a share of card activity. Worldwide cash volume rose 0.4% to $469 billion, while cash transactions fell 5.3% to 2.92 billion and, in the United States, 7.5%. Purchase transactions, by contrast, grew 9.3% to 59.5 billion. Maestro cards fell 16.9% to 269 million, while Mastercard-branded cards grew 7.1% to 3.54 billion, for a combined 3.81 billion, up 5.0%.

The volume and transaction data is supplied by Mastercard's customers and is "subject to verification by Mastercard and partial cross-checking," according to the footnotes. Card counts receive more limited verification, and Mastercard says routine portfolio changes and other practices "may lead to over counting of the underlying data in certain circumstances."

Agentic commerce and the BVNK deal

Agentic commerce gets one mention in today's materials, in Miebach's quote. Neither the release nor the 10-Q names Agent Pay, gives a count of agent-initiated transactions, or assigns revenue to AI shopping. The public record on the strategy therefore remains Mastercard's product announcements, which PPC Land has followed since 2025.

Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay on January 11, 2026 at the National Retail Federation conference, built on four principles: registration of agents on its network using network tokens, a standard interface with merchants, verification that an agent's purchase matches the consumer's request, and explicit consumer consent. The same day, Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, which Mastercard, Visa and others endorsed, and Visa described its own approach built on tokenisation.

The groundwork predates that. In October 2025, Cloudflare agreed to support Agent Pay and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, with Mastercard hosting a directory of registered agents. On March 5, 2026, Mastercard and Google introduced Verifiable Intent, a cryptographic record linking cardholder identity, the consumer's instructions and the resulting purchase, and in late April Mastercard contributed it to a new FIDO Alliance payments working group co-chaired by Mastercard and Visa members. On April 30, Mastercard and Rabobank completed the first AI agent-initiated payment in the Netherlands, which the bank described as a pilot.

Payments by agentic AI systems remain early, and the surface where they happen is changing. OpenAI ended Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in March 2026, after Walmart said products bought inside the chatbot converted three times worse than those reached by clicking out to its website. Google, meanwhile, began showing a Buy button for UCP checkout in main search results in May. For a network like Mastercard's, the question is less which assistant wins than whether agent purchases run on cards at all.

BVNK

The acquisition Miebach linked to his "Global Money Platform" is documented in more detail. On August 3, 2026, Mastercard acquired 100% of BVNK Holdings Limited, which the 10-Q describes as "a provider of stablecoin infrastructure," for total cash consideration of $1.4 billion. The sellers can earn up to $300 million more in contingent consideration if certain performance targets are met. The deal "is expected to expand Mastercard's capabilities to support the digital assets ecosystem," according to the filing.

Most of the price is goodwill. Of the assets recorded, $1,271 million is goodwill, "primarily attributable to the synergies expected to arise after the acquisition date," and $363 million is identified intangibles: $238 million of developed technologies with a weighted average useful life of nine years and $125 million of customer relationships with a life of 14 years. Mastercard says pro forma figures were not included because the impact on its consolidated results "was not considered to be material," and that it is still finalising the purchase accounting.

BVNK is the only acquisition described in the quarterly report. Acquisitions and dispositions added one percentage point to adjusted operating expense growth in the quarter and two points to depreciation and amortization, while their effect on revenue was, in the release's words, "a minimal decrease" in services growth. The fourth-quarter outlook shows the same pattern: inorganic activity adds about one point to expected operating expense growth and about zero to revenue. In May, Stripe's Patrick Collison said real-world stablecoin use in business-to-business agent transactions was still limited.

Spending, including Mastercard's own advertising

Mastercard is an advertiser in its own right as well as a seller of marketing services, and its own advertising budget is growing far more slowly than its revenue. Advertising and marketing expenses were $252 million in the third quarter, up 3% from $245 million, and $622 million over nine months, up 2% from $610 million. As a share of net revenue, that is 2.6% in the quarter against 2.8% a year earlier, by PPC Land's calculation.

Depreciation and amortization rose 12% to $326 million, mainly from higher amortization of capitalised software, and the provision for litigation was $74 million, against $83 million. Over nine months, purchases of property and equipment rose to $667 million from $377 million, while capitalised software spending fell to $474 million from $548 million.

Below operating income, interest expense rose 34% to $250 million on a larger debt load. Other income, net, rose to $46 million from $2 million, which the 10-Q attributes "primarily" to government grants.

Litigation: merchants, interchange and a fax case

The legal note runs long, and much of it concerns what merchants pay to accept cards.

United States

Mastercard's accrued liability for the US merchant interchange litigation fell to $156 million at September 30 from $637 million at the end of 2025, mainly because of payments made during 2026. It has settled with all but two of the merchants that opted out of the 2018 damages class settlement. The two remaining are Block and Intuit, which are "seeking aggregate single damages in excess of $5 billion," primarily on Mastercard purchase volume from smaller merchants for whom they acted as payment facilitators. Summary judgment briefing is expected to continue for the rest of 2026.

The settlement covering merchants who did not opt out is being tested. In April 2026, a putative class action was filed on behalf of merchants in that class, seeking damages on Mastercard and Visa credit card interchange since January 2019 and arguing that the release - which by its terms covers future damages claims through August 2028 - does not bar them. In September, the district court ruled against the plaintiffs, who have appealed to the Second Circuit. Also in September, a separate putative class action was filed for merchants who were not members of the damages class, over accepting Mastercard credit cards since January 2019.

The rules relief class, which seeks changes to business practices rather than money, has a revised settlement that received preliminary approval in June 2026. A final approval hearing is scheduled for November 2026. A separate settlement of US merchant claims over the 2015 EMV chip liability shift, for which Mastercard accrued $80 million in 2025, received final approval in April 2026.

United Kingdom and Europe

In the United Kingdom, over £0.5 billion (approximately $0.7 billion) of merchant damages claims remain unresolved. Mastercard won permission in March 2026 to appeal a 2025 liability ruling on all grounds; the appeal hearing is scheduled for February 2027, and further liability and damages issues are set for trial in October 2027. A collective action over commercial card transactions claims more than £1 billion (approximately $1.3 billion).

Two new proposed collective actions were served on Mastercard and Visa in October 2026 on behalf of UK merchants that have accepted transactions since October 2020. The first seeks approximately £1.5 billion (approximately $2.0 billion) from Mastercard over consumer domestic and cross-border transactions. The second seeks approximately £0.4 billion (approximately $0.5 billion) over consumer online cross-border transactions - the same category of spending whose growth slowed this quarter.

Elsewhere, a proposed consumer collective action in Portugal claims approximately €0.4 billion; a trial originally scheduled for October 2026 has been stayed. A proposed Dutch merchant action over interregional interchange fees since 1992 seeks approximately €0.3 billion. In Australia, a hearing on liability in the competition regulator's case over Mastercard's debit agreements with merchants concluded in June 2026. The European Commission's investigation, opened with a formal request for information in 2024, focuses on "Mastercard's practices regarding network fees related to acquirers."

Merchant costs have been contested on the debit side too. Federal Reserve data released in December 2025 showed merchants bore 49.9% of US debit card fraud losses in 2023, up from 38.3% in 2011.

The fax advertising case

One case concerns Mastercard's marketing directly. Mastercard is a defendant in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action in Florida brought by individuals and businesses who allege that "approximately 381,000 unsolicited faxes were sent to them advertising a Mastercard co-brand card issued by First Arkansas Bank." The statute provides for uncapped statutory damages of $500 per fax. At that rate, 381,000 faxes would come to $190.5 million, by PPC Land's arithmetic, although the court narrowed the class in 2021 to stand-alone fax recipients only, so the number of faxes at issue in the certified class is likely lower; the filing does not give it. Mastercard has asserted various defences and has notified the issuing bank of an indemnity claim, which the bank disputes. Briefing on the plaintiffs' motion to amend the class definition, and on Mastercard's motion to decertify, was completed in April 2023. The parties are still waiting for a decision.

Buybacks, dividends and debt

Mastercard bought back 5.3 million shares in the third quarter for $3.0 billion, at an average price of $562.50, and paid $763 million in dividends. Monthly average prices were $535.77 in July, $574.86 in August and $572.08 in September. From October 1 through October 26 it repurchased a further 1.1 million shares for about $0.6 billion, leaving $4.9 billion under approved programmes.

Over nine months, repurchases of 22.9 million shares cost $11.9 billion, at an average of $520.64, and dividends paid came to $2.3 billion. Together, that is $14.2 billion returned to shareholders, more than the $11.9 billion of operating cash flow over the same period, by PPC Land's comparison. Over those nine months, Mastercard raised $5.6 billion of debt, net of discounts.

Most of that came in June 2026, when Mastercard issued $5.0 billion of senior notes in five tranches: $500 million of floating-rate notes due June 2028 at compounded SOFR plus 0.39%, $1.25 billion at 4.325% due June 2028, $1.15 billion at 4.425% due June 2029, $1.35 billion at 4.600% due June 2031 and $750 million at 5.000% due June 2036. Net proceeds were $4.978 billion. Total debt reached $23.9 billion at September 30, against $19.0 billion at the end of 2025, with $1.7 billion due within 12 months. Total equity fell to $6.7 billion from $7.7 billion as treasury stock grew.

The quarterly dividend is $0.87 a share, up from $0.76 a year earlier. The latest, declared on September 29, is payable on November 9 to holders of record on October 9.

Outlook

Mastercard presents its guidance as reconciliation tables rather than numbers. For full-year 2026, it still expects net revenue to grow at the "high end of low double digits" on a currency-neutral basis excluding acquisitions, and "low teens" on a GAAP basis, unchanged from its prior outlook. The one revision is to GAAP operating expenses, now expected to grow at the "low end of low double digits" rather than the "high end of high single digits." Adjusted operating expense growth stays at the "high end of low double digits," or "low double digits" excluding currency and acquisitions. The tables list litigation provisions at about three points of expense growth and the restructuring charge at about minus one point, the same values as before, and do not explain the GAAP revision.

For the fourth quarter, Mastercard expects net revenue growth at the "high end of low double digits" on both a GAAP and an adjusted basis, with currency a headwind of about one point. Adjusted operating expenses are expected to grow in the "low teens," including about one point from acquisitions, and at the "high end of low double digits" excluding currency and acquisitions. On a GAAP basis, expense growth is expected in the "high single digit" range, because the fourth quarter of 2025 included $174 million of litigation provisions.

Mastercard held a conference call at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time today to discuss the results.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Mastercard reaches the marketing industry from three directions, and the third-quarter numbers bear on each.

The first is as a seller of data and media. The company has spent a year pitching its commerce media network to brands on the strength of its transaction data, and its services business is now growing almost twice as fast as its network. Yet the only trace of marketing services in today's filing is a cost line. Agencies allocating budgets to Mastercard's network, or comparing it with retail media networks that disclose ad revenue, get no revenue, advertiser count or campaign result from Mastercard's financial reporting. Competition for that data is not standing still either: on October 21, TransUnion introduced a product with Fiserv that links in-store card payments to pseudonymised customer profiles for advertising and measurement.

The second is as the pipe for online selling across borders. Cross-border card-not-present spending outside travel is about as close as Mastercard's disclosures come to a measure of international e-commerce, and its growth fell from 20% to 15% between the second and third quarters, then to 14% in early October. Merchants that sell abroad through marketplaces or their own sites, and the advertisers that fund international acquisition campaigns, are exposed to that rate. The new UK claim over consumer online cross-border transactions shows the same flows are also contested on price.

The third is agentic commerce. Mastercard has positioned Agent Pay, Verifiable Intent and its agent directory as the trust layer for purchases made by AI assistants, alongside Google's protocol and Visa's competing work. Today's results show the company still treats the subject as a strategy rather than a reportable business. With OpenAI having already withdrawn its in-chat checkout, no transaction or revenue figures yet exist from Mastercard to show how much buying AI agents actually do on its network.

The rebate figures matter too. Rebates and incentives to customers grew 18%, faster than revenue, and exceeded the network revenue Mastercard kept, with "new and renewed deals" cited as a driver. The documents do not name the customers involved or say what the deals cover.

What the documents do not say

The release, presentation, supplemental data and 10-Q leave several questions open. They do not break value-added services revenue down by product, and give no revenue, advertiser or campaign figures for Mastercard Commerce Media, Dynamic Yield or Mastercard Marketing Services. They do not report any agentic commerce volume or name Agent Pay. They give no domestic e-commerce or domestic card-not-present figures, and no reason for the five-point drop in cross-border card-not-present growth outside travel. They do not explain the flattening of US debit volume, the slowdown in European card growth or the revision to the GAAP expense outlook. And they give no revenue figure for BVNK, only the statement that its effect on consolidated results is not material.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Mastercard Incorporated, its chief executive Michael Miebach and chief financial officer Hai Ling, and the banks, merchants and partners on its network. The results matter to brands and agencies buying Mastercard's commerce media and marketing services, to merchants selling across borders, and to companies building payments for AI shopping agents.

What: Net revenue rose 14% to $9.8 billion in the third quarter of 2026. Value-added services and solutions grew 19% to $4.06 billion, reaching 41.4% of revenue, while payment network revenue grew 11% to $5.75 billion after $6.37 billion of rebates and incentives. Net income rose 18% to $4.6 billion and diluted earnings per share 22% to $5.28. Cross-border volume grew 11%, with card-not-present spending outside travel slowing to 15% from 20% in the second quarter. Mastercard closed its $1.4 billion purchase of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK on August 3 and disclosed two new UK collective actions seeking about £1.9 billion combined. The filings give no revenue for marketing services or agentic commerce.

When: Reported today, October 29, 2026, for the quarter ended September 30, 2026, with a business update through October 21 and repurchase data through October 26.

Where: Mastercard is based in Purchase, New York, and operates in more than 220 countries and territories. Latin America led volume and card growth, Europe slowed, and US debit volume was nearly flat. Litigation is under way in the United States, the United Kingdom, Portugal, the Netherlands and Australia, with a European Commission investigation also open.

Why: Mastercard's growth is shifting from running card transactions toward the services it sells on top of them, including the marketing and data products it offers to advertisers. The quarter shows that shift in the revenue mix, the rising cost of issuer deals and a slowdown in cross-border online spending, while leaving the size of its advertising and agentic commerce businesses undisclosed.