Visa vs Mastercard, side by side
It is easy to mistake them for banks. They are not - your bank issues the card and takes the credit risk; Visa and Mastercard just run the network in the middle and collect a tiny fee on each of the billions of transactions that cross it. Two near-identical tollbooths on the world's move away from cash.
On our factor screen it looks strongest on quality and momentum, and weakest on value.
On our factor screen it looks strongest on quality and momentum, and weakest on value.
The numbers, side by side
| Measure |  Visa |  Mastercard |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $366.13 | $573.10 |
| Market cap: The company's total value on the stock market - share price times the number of shares. Big = 'large-cap', small = 'small-cap'. | $683.58B | $502.04B |
| P/E: Price-to-earnings: the share price divided by yearly profit per share. Lower can mean cheaper; higher often means investors expect fast growth. | 31.2 | 31.5 |
| Div yield: Dividend yield: the yearly dividend as a percentage of the share price - roughly the income you'd earn just from dividends. | 0.7% | 0.6% |
| Revenue growth | 14.4% | 14.1% |
| 1Y: How much the share price has moved over the past year. | +5% | +3% |
More measures
| Forward P/E: Price-to-earnings: the share price divided by yearly profit per share. Lower can mean cheaper; higher often means investors expect fast growth. | 24.5 | 25.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Net margin | 50.8% | 46.3% |
| ROE | 61.2% | 241.2% |
| Beta: How bumpy the share price is versus the whole market. Above 1 swings more than the market; below 1 is calmer. It's about the ride, not whether it goes up or down. | 0.75 | 0.73 |
The bolder figure is simply the larger of the two - higher is not automatically good (a higher P/E means more expectation in the price; a higher beta means bigger swings).
How they differ
Visa is roughly 1.4x the size of Mastercard by market value. On our factor screen Visa currently screens higher on quality, while Mastercard screens higher on growth.
Descriptive only - how the two compare on today's data, never a verdict on either.
Visa, in one line
Visa is the global plumbing for digital payments, acting as the middleman that securely connects your bank to merchants whenever you tap your card.
Read the full Visa explainer →Mastercard, in one line
Mastercard is the global plumbing system that allows money to move instantly between your bank card and the shops where you spend it.
Read the full Mastercard explainer →Common questions
If they are so similar, what actually differs?
Scale and mix. Visa processes more volume overall; Mastercard has grown a little faster in some regions and services. Their margins, models and risks rhyme - which is itself the lesson: this is a duopoly.
What could genuinely hurt both?
Anything that bypasses the card rails - account-to-account payments, digital wallets that route around them, or regulators capping the fees the networks charge. These are slow-moving but real pressures.