What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
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Most people can recognize the Visa and Mastercard brands. Chances are, you use one of their cards to transact every day. You may have some notion that most places (in the US) take both, but some places only take Visa (e.g. Costco), and vice versa.
So what do they do? Here’s Visa’s attempt to answer that question.
Instead, Visa and Mastercard are card networks 3 , facilitating card transactions by connecting the cardholders and issuers to the merchants and acquirers.
This forms a two-sided market of all the participants in a transaction 4 :
The card network’s job is to enable card transactions, and also to grow participation in their networks.
This boils down to four key responsibilities: