Earnings Review: Reflection and focus

The end of each quarter provides a moment of reflection – what have we accomplished? What has worked well? Where do we have opportunities to build and strengthen the value we deliver? 

Today was no different as we hosted a conference call for investors and the financial community to review our performance in the third quarter. During that call, CEO Michael Miebach and I reinforced how our results demonstrate the strong fundamentals of our business, our diversified business model and the drive of our people to deliver for customers and partners. 

Let’s get into a few examples of how our strategy and strong fundamentals worked for us this quarter. 

Expanding in payments: We are winning deals across diverse partners and geographies. That – combined with growing our acceptance footprint — positions us well to capture personal expenditures and the secular growth. It’s more than that. We’re evolving and building new technologies that create more value and growth. To put it simply, it’s about delivering what people want and expect every day. 

You only have to look at the past decade since we introduced the token standard to the industry. That core technology has opened so many new opportunities in digital and mobile wallets, enabling people to pay and be paid in a safe and secure way — more than 3 billion tokenized transactions were processed on our network in one month. And that is poised to grow as we think of new ways to bring the convenience of electronic payments to more places — in car, in app and more. 

Extending our services: There’s so much happening in this space, both in standalone offerings and in helping to drive the payment flows. We look at it as a virtuous circle. Services can improve the performance of a card portfolio, which leads to incremental payment flows. That in turn creates more areas to put these services to work, and so on. 

Ensuring we are there when our customers need us is why we recently announced an expansion of our consulting activities into artificial intelligence and economic insights. It’s also seen in our relentless focus to protect our network and the broader ecosystem. In the past 12 months, more than $20 billion in fraud was prevented by Safety Net, which is just one of our many fraud solutions. And we’re protecting businesses and merchants in the fight against “friendly” fraud in solutions like our First-Party Trust program.    

Embracing new networks: During our call, Michael discussed how open banking remains a key opportunity because of the wide range of potential use cases it can support. We have focused on strengthening a powerful set of assets that provide the connectivity and scale in Europe and the U.S. to help people maximize the value their financial data can deliver for them. This includes account-to-account bill payments and our previously announced partnership with J.P. Morgan Payments’ Pay-by-bank, now live, with Verizon looking to offer this option to its customers in the coming months.  

These are just a few examples, and these results don’t just happen on their own. There’s a lot of hard work and execution delivered by our teams around the world every day. They’re challenging each other to think differently and deliver innovations and new ideas. That adds to their collaboration with partners, digging into challenges and local needs to create meaningful solutions. 

With all of that said, what’s next? A continued focus on a robust business that delivers value in the short, medium and long term. We’re committed to our strategy and to managing the things that we can control to continue to deliver value to our stakeholders.