Becoming a Double Middleman

I love to see when companies find new ways to deepen their engagement within an industry by leveraging data they collect, like hotels.com, they are an aggregator for customers but also can provide customer and forecasting insight back to the hotels, a "double middleman."

MA has an enormous amount of transaction data. In their quarterly reports, you can see that the revenue stream "Value-added services and solutions" is making up a large percent and growing.
Q3 quotes (MA.09.30.2025 - EX-99.1 - Earnings Release):
"“This quarter, these value-added services and solutions delivered net revenue growth of 25% year-over-year, or 22% on a currency-neutral basis. We launched the Mastercard Commerce Media network, new cyber threat intelligence solutions for payments and expanded agentic commerce capabilities, all industry-shaping innovations aimed at driving customer value and unlocking new buying centers.”

"Value-added services and solutions net revenue increased 22%, or 21% on a currency-neutral basis. This includes a 3 percentage point increase from acquisitions. The remaining increase was driven primarily by growth in our underlying drivers, security and digital and authentication solutions, consumer acquisition and engagement services, and pricing."

"Net revenue increased 17%, or 15% on a currency-neutral basis. This increase includes a 1 percentage point increase from acquisitions. The remaining increase was attributable to organic growth in our payment network and our value-added services and solutions."

What are they?
Cyber & Intelligence: Fraud prevention, threat intelligence, security, identity services.

Data & Services: Analytics, insights, consulting, marketing, loyalty.
Processing / Gateway / Payments Infrastructure: This includes things like ACH, real-time account-based payments, open banking, and digital identity.
Open Banking & Digital Identity: Helping banks, merchants and others verify identities and manage account-to-account flows.
Loyalty / Marketing / Consulting: Helping issuers and merchants with loyalty programs, targeted offerings, and strategic consulting.

This is great to see how they are growing revenue in new B2B opportunities.

TLDR: Mastercard is able to increase revenue through B2B products

LINKS:
Deep dive into the Data Intelligence playbook:
decision-intelligence-beyond-mastercard-playbook.pdf

Fighting fraud with digital identity and open finance data