Getting to know Mastercard
Throughout its history, Mastercard has truly been at ‘the heart of commerce’, driving the evolution of the credit card and the cashless payment networks of today. Mastercard strives to realize its vision of a world beyond cash, and has continually dedicated its resources to achieve this goal by utilizing their technology and expertise to provide safe, simple and smart payment solutions. Their principal business is to process payments and purchases between merchant banks and credit card issuing banks utilizing the Mastercard brand.
Mastercard Inc. (or Mastercard Worldwide) was created in 1966 as a member-owned association by a group of banks from California and rapidly expanded its international presence in Mexico, Japan and Europe in 1968. Since then, they have been continually achieving major milestones in the industry, such as being the first payment card issuer in the People’s Republic of China in 1980 and becoming a private share corporation with a unified global structure upon integrating with Europay International in 2002.