Mastercard (MA) grows net income nearly 3x faster than Visa (V), at 19% vs 7%, while expanding adjusted operating margins to 61%. Both companies are pursuing agentic commerce differently, with Visa restructuring engineering internally while Mastercard acquires stablecoin infrastructure via BVNK for machine-to-machine payments. It sounds nuts, but SoFi1 is giving new Active Invest users up to $3,000 in stock for a limited time, and all it takes is a $50 deposit to get started.2 See for yourself (Sponsor) Visa (NYSE:V) and Mastercard (NYSE:MA) both closed their latest quarters on July 28 and July 30, and the reports told two variations of the same story.
Visa flexed scale, printing $11.63 billion in net revenue. Mastercard flexed profitability and services mix. With payments regulation, stablecoins, and agentic commerce all reshaping the rails, this is the right moment to compare the two.
Visa processed $72 billion transactions and pushed quarterly payments volume past $4 trillion for the first time. CEO Ryan McInerney called the company "the leading hyperscaler of payments globally", and the numbers back him up. Data Processing revenue of $6.04 billion grew 17%, still the workhorse.
Mastercard is smaller but sharper. Adjusted EPS came in at $5.04 against a $4.77 estimate, a 5.66% beat and its 6th consecutive quarter of topping consensus. Value-added services and solutions revenue grew 20%, and adjusted operating margin expanded to 61.1%.
Michael Miebach highlighted the Apple Card win, Banamex renewal covering almost 19 million cards, and Central Bank of UAE switching tech. Both companies are chasing agentic payments and stablecoins, but the postures differ. Visa is restructuring 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.
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