Mastercard began as small banks teaming up because Bank of America hid its profits
Bank of America's credit card lost money at its 1958 launch, turned profitable by 1961, and the bank kept quiet so rivals would stay away. When the secret got out in 1966, hundreds of banks rushed in. Their answer to BankAmericard, later Visa, eventually became Mastercard.
Between 1966 and 1968 roughly 440 new bank cards appeared across the United States. Many issuers were unit banks, legally confined to a single branch, and early cards failed because they only worked near the issuing bank. Pooling customers, merchants and back-office work through regional associations solved that. In 1966 Karl H. Hinke of Marine Midland Bank, refused a BankAmericard licence for being too big, invited other banks to Buffalo, and they formed what became the Interbank Card Association. It had 150 members by the end of 1967.
Interbank's first logo was a tiny lowercase i in a circle, useless for building a national brand. In 1969 it combined a name coined by a Louisville bank, Master Charge, with the overlapping yellow and orange circles of a western bankcard group; the circles survive today. The card became MasterCard in 1979, pioneered holograms for security in 1983, six months ahead of Visa, and bought the Cirrus cash machine network in 1985. In 2002 it merged with Europay.
For decades it was a cooperative owned by more than 25,000 card-issuing institutions. It went public in May 2006, selling 95.5 million shares at $39, and was valued at $434 billion by April 2024. Recent buys include the British payments firm VocaLink, identity checker Ekata, cybersecurity company Recorded Future for $2.65 billion, and in 2026 stablecoin start-up BVNK for $1.8 billion. It also tested cards with fingerprint sensors built in.
Few companies have faced more antitrust suits. With Visa it shut American Express out of partner banks in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Justice Department won a case over those rules in 2001; Mastercard later paid Amex $1.8 billion. Merchants have fought it for decades over swipe fees, including a 1996 suit settled in 2003 for what was then the largest antitrust award ever.
Source: Mastercard
