The card brands – like Mastercard and Visa – are household names. Cards with their logos are in everyone’s wallets. Visa alone says it processes more than 250 billion transactions a year.
So, unsurprisingly, these companies have an outsized role within the payments industry. As the owners of the rails that all these card transactions travel over, they maintain a system that buyers and sellers all over the world can both rely on and trust. Kind of a big deal.
The card brands set interchange rates. They develop new products and services and promote card usage. And, they serve as gatekeepers – establishing rules that everyone who wants to participate in payments must either follow or go find something else to do.
All that is to say that, whether you’re dipping your toe in payments or you’re all the way in the pool, what you do will be heavily influenced by the card networks. That makes their role worth understanding, and their activities worth following.
