Mastercard Incorporated (MA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. My name is Julianne, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Mastercard Incorporated Q2 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Mr. Devin Corr, Head of Investor Relations. You may now begin your conference.

Thank you, Julianne. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today are Michael Miebach, our Chief Executive Officer; Sachin Mehra, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ling Hai, our President of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa and incoming CFO effective August 3. Following comments from Michael and Sachin, the operator will announce your opportunity to get into the queue for the Q&A session. It is only then that the queue will open for questions. You can access our earnings release, supplemental performance data and the slide deck that accompany this call in the Investor Relations section of our website, mastercard.com. Additionally, the release was furnished with the SEC earlier this morning. Our comments today regarding our financial results will be on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. Both the release and the slide deck include reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP reported amounts. Finally, as set forth in more detail in our earnings release, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements regarding Mastercard's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Information about the factors that could affect future performance are summarized at the end of our earnings release and in our recent SEC filings. A replay of this call will be posted on our website for 30 days. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Miebach.

Thank you, Devin. Good morning, everyone. This is Sachin's last earnings call as CFO, and he's sitting right across the table. So before turning to our quarterly results, I'd like to take this moment to thank him and recognize him for the significant impact he's had in the role. Sachin? Thank you. And we're excited to see you carry the same focus, discipline and drive into your new role as Chief Business Officer. At the same time, as you heard from Devin, Ling Hai is in the room today. He will assume the role of CFO, bringing his deep knowledge of our business, our products and our industry. You've seen that play out in the company's strong track record of supporting and growing with customers across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa. These changes as well as those across the entire leadership team reflects the strength and depth of our team. Operating as one team brings complementary experience and perspectives that sharpen focus, strengthen execution and create greater value for our customers and shareholders. From a position of strength, this evolution will help us capture the opportunities ahead and continue realizing Mastercard's full potential, and that's priceless, of course. With that, let's drive into this quarter's results. The second quarter 2026 was another strong quarter for Mastercard. Net revenues were above our expectations, up 12%. Adjusted net income up 16% and value-added services net revenue up 18% all year-over-year on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis. The macro environment remains supportive. Consumers and businesses are healthy and continue to spend, supported by positive job growth, low unemployment and real purchasing power in many major economies. At the same time, we continue to monitor our geopolitical uncertainty and its potential economic impacts. But macro is the only one part of our growth story. Our performance is driven by a clear strategy, disciplined execution and differentiated value for our customers. We remain focused on consumer payments, commercial and new payment flows and value-added services and solutions, each with significant runway and together, reinforcing Mastercard's virtual cycle. That's a good road map for today's call. So let's dive in. Starting with the secular opportunity. There is significant runway to digitize consumer and commercial flows for many years to come. As a reminder, at our last Investor Day, we shared that only 1/3 of consumer transactions were corded, and the secular opportunity is even larger in commercial flows. We're targeting the secular opportunity in a way that drives outsized growth to Mastercard. For example, we continue to work with governments around the world to digitize disbursements and benefits programs, making it easier for consumers to access and use benefits and driving more volume to Mastercard. This includes food assistance programs in the United States, which represent $100 billion of spend each year. Through our exclusive partnership with Evermore, we are now rolling out a new program for beneficiaries to have a simple, more secure solution. And we're also capturing incremental transactions through our exclusive partnership with Alipay Plus, embedding Mastercard credentials into their network of e-wallets. This quarter, we're expanding this partnership in Mexico with Clip, a leading fintech with a small and micro business network approaching 1 million merchants. Combining Clip's merchant network, Alipay Wallet capabilities and Mastercard's global payment capabilities is a powerful solution to digitize payments in Mexico. And as a country where more than 70% of consumer payments are cash based. Mastercard is exclusively tokenizing the stored wallet balances, enabling users to transact across Mastercard's global acceptance network. Complementing our efforts to drive outside secular growth, we are finding new ways to power payments. Switching is critical to our virtuous cycle. More switched transactions lead to more data to fuel our services, increase our ability to distribute services over our network. We steadily increased our switching penetration now reaching 72%. The reason Mastercard's rich value proposition, especially compared to local networks. So our global acceptance reach, consumer protections, digital capabilities and security overlays. We're also expanding our role in switching by flexing our network architecture. We're adapting to best meet the needs of the markets that we serve while ensuring we meet our long-term growth objectives and drive the virtuous cycle. That's exactly what we're doing in the United Arab Emirates. The Central Bank of the UAE through its subsidiary, Al Etihad Payments, is partnering with Mastercard to build the switching technology in the UAE for the next phase of the country's domestic payments infrastructure. And we will serve as the prime international scheme for co-batched credit cards with the domestic scheme named Jaywan. As part of this partnership, Mastercard will provide switching services behind domestic debit in Jaywan Mastercard cobatch credit transactions in the UAE. These transactions are incremental to what we process through our global switch. Mastercard will also provide value-add services to the domestic switch, including fraud prevention and cybersecurity. Our direct relationships with ecosystem customers in the UAE continue as they do today. And that's our best-in-class technology at work locally, powering the UAE's digital economy facilitating more transactions and further scaling our services. That is another example of how we partner locally to drive collective value. And we continue to win and expand issuing relationships across our business. In the first half of 2026, we won several hundred flips and deal expansions, which are expected to drive trillions of dollars in incremental volume to our network over the next decade. This quarter, we renewed a key partnership with JPMorgan Chase on the Chase Freedom Flex portfolio in the U.S. and in Mexico, renewed our partnership with Banamex, where we have exclusivity for nearly all portfolios, representing almost 19 million cards. We've expanded our partnership with Revolut, now supporting their affluent debit proposition, Ultra across Singapore and Australia, plus their commercial portfolio in New Zealand, all building up on our growing partnership in the U.S. and long-standing relationship globally. We flipped through Lion Federal Credit Unions, U.S. credit and debit portfolios as well as Eurobank and higher consumer and commercial portfolios in Greece. Once complete, there's over 1 million new Mastercards across the 2. We launched new co-brands with Uber and Hilton in Mexico. And with the recent flip in Saudi National Bank's travel co-brand portfolio, we're now the exclusive partner across their credit, debit, prepaid and commercial portfolios. I shared some wins that span commercial already, but let's dig into that a bit more. Mastercard's commercial debit and credit volumes grew at 12% in the second quarter. We continue to build on this momentum as banks and large corporates turn to Mastercard's modernized commercial payment capabilities. We've added, on average, 6 million new Mastercard small business cards to the market each quarter for the past several quarters. And we see incremental issuance from this quarter's wins, including Intuit in the United States. Truist Bank, in the U.S., has chosen Mastercard's leading virtual card capabilities for their corporate clients invoice-based payments needs. Also, we continue to support global money movement through Mastercard Move, most recently partnering with WeChat Pay Hong Kong and Pyrimid in India. And then in the travel space, we have an exclusive partnership with Riyadh Air, Saudi Arabia's new national airline. This is an exciting global First, as consumers can use their suite of branded prepaid and credit cards to purchase tickets and build brand loyalty, while travel agents benefit from seamless virtual card payments and Riyadh Air can streamline supplier payments. We're winning -- our geographic footprint, differentiated proposition and innovation allow us to capture more of the market. We have added over 230 million net new Mastercard into the market in the 12 months through quarter 2 of this year. That's new issuers, expanded relationships and even more payment transactions, more tokens, all of which we can also attach services to. So when you think about our virtuous cycle, it's real and at scale. The combination of that network scale, the breadth of our data and the depth of our customer relationships with differentiated services underpin our long-term sustainable growth. Our services benefit from Mastercard's proprietary transactional data as well as open finance, loyalty and identity trends and insights. This also includes bespoke services like consulting, marketing, both key to winning carded market share and optimizing our portfolios. For example, starting this quarter, we are managing the portfolio conversions for Westpac in Australia and Yapi Kredi in Turkey following our recent wins. We're working with Santander in the U.K. to accelerate cross-border spend through targeted marketing campaigns and our work with Bancolombia will help optimize their small business and commercial portfolios, the outcome, more payments volume. Moving to Security Solutions, a hot topic in today's environment, the proliferation of AI new frontier models amplifying new needs. We're seeing increased demand for Mastercard's robust and unique security solutions as clients navigate the ever-expanding threat landscape. Today, we have differentiated capabilities that span cybersecurity, identity and fraud. Our value suite is unmatched, and we continue to build up on it. Let me share a few examples. We're identifying threats before they materialize, how we're bringing recorded futures market-leading intelligence capabilities to our clients globally and seeing strong engagement across sectors. This quarter, we partnered with Wipro, a global information technology and consulting company, to further scale our capabilities. Building up on our acquisition of Recorded Future, we also launched Mastercard Threat Intelligence, specifically for payment fraud. In its first 3 quarters, Threat Intelligence has identified more than 7 million card testing transactions across 192 countries. Stopping that activity prevented an estimated $172 million in fraud linked to malicious domains. That's real value to us, our customers and, of course, our cardholders. And with strengthening security and customer experiences, Mastercard's identity solutions help customers authenticate identities for payment and nonpayment use cases. This quarter, Rogers Communications in Canada and Delivery Hero leverage Mastercard's identity capabilities, the verified transaction authenticity, customer onboarding and more. And we continue to make commerce safer through new innovations. Mastercard Merchant Trust Services is a new suite of AI-powered capabilities to help identify fraudulent merchants. Keeping the scammers from setting up shop will reduce fraud, cut out disputes and provide greater security, the goal, real transactions for real purchases from real merchants. Our value-added services and solutions growth engine is strong and durable. We benefit from the underlying market tailwinds in security, data and AI, personalization and more. There are also natural synergies between our value-add services and solutions and our payment network. That includes distribution. Today, about 60% of our value-add services and solutions net revenue is network linked. We're attaching services to Mastercard switch transactions as well as faster growing drivers such as tokens or card not present transactions. And customers are using more Mastercard services, both existing and new products, we do sell through direct engagement and through distribution partners. We recently launched Mastercard Advantage Partner Program and have more than 200 partners expanding our reach. All of this drives growth and expanding yields, more customers, more services adopted by each with higher contract value. That's the virtuous cycle at work. Again, and that's powerful. We play a central role in commerce today, and we are shaping the future of commerce and by helping our customers navigate that future. Agentic Commerce is the next evolution in payments where the importance of security, transparency and control only increase. Agentic Commerce creates a significant opportunity for Mastercard. It leads to incremental transactions and even more opportunity for our services. The Mastercard Agent Pay, we're helping power secure and trusted agentic transactions across our global acceptance network using tokenization, 0 liability protections and unique dispute resolution capabilities. These capabilities are just a few of the reasons why we expect cards will prevail in an agentic world, both in consumer and commercial use cases. It's early days, but engagement across the globe is energizing. The rise of agentic commerce also brings about an entirely new class of payment use cases, machine-to-machine payments. This is an expansion of our addressable market and one that we are at the forefront. We recently announced Mastercard Agent Pay for machines, which enables AI agents to purchase low-value digital services such as APIs, compute, data, content at machine speed. With on-chain permissioning and off-chain settlement, Mastercard is the only network enabling machine-to-machine payments. An ecosystem is rallying behind us. At launch, we had more than 30 industry leaders participating, including Alien and international, BBK, checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase and OPX. We are a first mover in this space and one with credibility and trust to deliver. Next is stablecoins. We believe stablecoins have great potential but to work. There are a few essential principles for it to scale, reliability, security and interoperability, and that's what Mastercard delivers. There's clear utility for stablecoins, for example, in some B2B and P2P flows, but no problem to solve in P2M. In fact, digital asset players are choosing to partner with Mastercard to unlock trusted commerce at scale, benefiting from our global acceptance network protection- and security. We offer a wide variety of crypto co-branded propositions, and we're seeing strong traction. Our crypto cobrand volume has more than tripled over the last 2 Years. This quarter, we expanded our relationships with Bit Get and Kraken. Stablecoins are additive to our network. It's another opportunity for us to enable choice and how our customers and cardholders engage in commerce. We're also enabling our customers to participate in the emerging digital asset ecosystem through the creation of open standards. For our customers that provides direct participation, reduce dependency on third parties and the benefits of distributed economics. Open USD set to go live later this year. It's another coin that we will enable across our network. We believe this space will evolve and with it will be nation of digital assets, including blockchains, coins and tokenized deposits, all operating in tandem and with ciat. That's an opportunity for us. We expect to close the BVK acquisition this quarter. With BVNK, Mastercard will serve as the trusted interoperable layer, enabling customers to send, receive, store and convert assets. BBMK's enterprise-grade payment orchestration capabilities, robust licensing and connectivity are highly differentiated, and they are in market today. So in summary, we have a proven strategy and continue to deliver consistently strong results. Our confidence is backed by proof points. We are winning by capturing outsized growth with delivering differentiated value, and we are shaping the future of commerce. That is what drives sustainable growth. Sachin, over to you, one more time.

Great. Well, thank you, Michael. Look, before I jump into the numbers, I'd like to take a moment to thank all of our investors and analysts. I truly appreciate your engagement, your thoughtful questions and the support over the past 7-plus years that I've had the privilege of serving as the CFO of this company. Mastercard is a special company with so much opportunity ahead, and I'm excited to continue driving our strategy from a different seat. I'm not going very far and our paths will cross again in a different capacity, and I look forward to it. So now let's dive in. Turning to Page 3, which shows our financial performance for the second quarter on a currency-neutral basis, excluding where applicable, special items and the impact of gains and losses on our equity investments. Net revenue was up 12%, reflecting continued growth in our payment network and our value-added services and solutions with minimal impact from dispositions. Operating expenses increased 10%, including a 1 ppt benefit from dispositions. And operating income was up 14%. Net income and EPS increased 16% and 19%, respectively, driven primarily by the strong operating income growth in the quarter. EPS was $5.04, which includes a $0.14 contribution from share repurchases. During the quarter, we repurchased $4.9 billion worth of stock and approximately $700 million of additional stock through July 27, 2026. Now turning to Page 4, where I'll speak to the growth rates of our key volume drivers for the second quarter on a local currency basis. Worldwide gross dollar volume, or GDV, increased by 8% year-over-year. In the U.S., GDV increased by 6% with credit growth of 10% and debit growth of 1%. As a reminder, the Capital One debit portfolio migration was basically complete in Q1. Excluding the impacts from that migration, our U.S. debit GDV growth would have been 8%. Outside of the U.S., GDV increased 9% with credit growth of 9% and debit growth of 10%. Cross-border volume increased 12% globally for the quarter, reflecting continued growth in both travel and non-travel related cross-border spending. Turning to Page 5. Switched transactions grew 9% year-over-year in Q2. We continue to drive contactless penetration, which in Q2 stood at 80% of all in-person switched purchase transactions. This is up 5 ppt since the same period last year. And token penetration reached over 40% of all switched transactions this quarter. In addition, card growth was 5%. Globally, there are 3.7 billion Mastercard and Maestro-branded cost issued. Turning to Slide 6 for a look into our net revenue growth rates for the second quarter discussed on a currency-neutral basis. Payment Network net revenue increased 8%, primarily driven by domestic and cross-border transaction and volume growth as well as pricing. It also includes growth in rebates and incentives. Value-Added Services & Solutions net revenue increased 18%. This includes a minimal drag from dispositions. The increase was driven primarily by growth in our underlying drivers, strong demand for our security solutions, consumer acquisition and engagement, digital and authentication and business and market insights and pricing. Now let's turn to Page 7 to discuss key metrics related to the payment network. Again, all growth rates are described on a currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. Looking quickly at each key metric. Domestic assessments were up 10%, while worldwide GDV grew 8%. The 2 ppt difference is primarily driven by pricing. Cross-border assessments increased 20%, while cross-border volumes increased 12%. The 8 ppt difference is driven primarily by pricing in international markets and mix. Transaction processing assessments were up 12%, while switched transactions grew 9%. The 3 ppt difference is primarily due to favorable mix and pricing, partially offset by lower revenue from FX volatility. And other network assessments were $326 million this quarter. Moving on to Page 8. You can see that on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis, excluding special items, total adjusted operating expenses increased 10%, which includes a 1 ppt benefit from dispositions. The growth in operating expenses was primarily driven by spending to drive the execution of our strategic priorities, including initiatives to further harden our infrastructure, geographic expansion and product innovation. Turning to Page 9. Let me comment on the operating metric trends for Q2 and the first 4 weeks of July. Switch metrics were generally in line with Q1 and underlying spend remained stable. Of note, excluding Capital One debit, on a like-for-like basis, U.S. switched volume growth was 10% or 2 ppt higher sequentially. This increase was driven by higher spend on fuel and overall strong consumer and business spending. Moving to our cross-border metrics. Our overall cross-border volume growth remained healthy at 12% in the second quarter. Cross-border card-not-present ex travel remained strong at 20%, benefiting from increased card-not-present spend from Venezuela and the timing of large retail promotional events. And while cross-border travel was down sequentially, relative to the April metrics we discussed on our last earnings call, we saw improved growth in the quarter due to lower impacts from the developments in the Middle East and timing of holidays. Now as we look at the first 4 weeks of July, our metrics remained relatively stable and strong. Looking specifically at card-not-present ex travel, let's focus on July compared to June. The sequential decline is primarily driven by timing, including the large retail promotional events that happened in June this year as compared to July last year and by mix of days. Turning to Page 10. In Q2, Mastercard delivered above expectations. This strong performance was broad-based with the upside primarily driven by lower-than-anticipated impact from the challenges in the Middle East an uptick in cross-border spend out of Venezuela, where we are market leaders and strong demand for our value-added services and solutions. These results, despite an uncertain geopolitical and economic backdrop, are evidence of the resilience of our diversified business model and our continued focus on execution across both payment network and value-added services and solutions. As Michael said, we continue to see a macroeconomic environment that is generally supportive. Around the world, economies are adapting to changing conditions with consumers and businesses continuing to demonstrate resilience. This is reflected in our underlying drivers. We continue to monitor geopolitical tensions and related energy prices, along with critical economic data like unemployment, inflation and so on. But overall, the underlying fundamentals of consumer and business spending and travel remain healthy. As we look at the second half of the year, our base case continues to assume spending remains healthy. As noted earlier, impacts from the instability in the Middle East moderated throughout the second quarter and were less severe than we anticipated. As we look to the rest of the year, we estimate impacts from the Middle East conflict will remain at similar levels to what we saw towards the end of Q2. As you know, the environment in the Middle East remains dynamic. But remember, we are a diversified company, and that's true across payment products, geographies, spend categories and services. This, coupled with our continued execution, helps us navigate across a range of operating environments. Now turning to our thoughts for Q3 and the remainder of the year, which include the impacts related to the acquisition of BVNK that we expect to close in Q3. As it relates to our expectations for the third quarter of 2026, year-over-year net revenue growth is expected to be at the high end of low double digits range on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity. We expect a minimal impact from inorganic activity and a headwind of approximately 0.5 ppt from foreign exchange, given the recent trajectory of the U.S. dollar. From an operating expense standpoint, we expect Q3 growth to be at the low double digits range versus a year ago on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity and special items. We anticipate a 0.5 ppt headwind from inorganic activity, while foreign exchange is forecasted to be a tailwind of approximately 0 to 0.5 ppt for the quarter. As we look to the full year of 2026, we expect net revenue growth to be at the high end of low double digits range on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity. Although this is the same range we shared previously, we now expect to be higher within the range than our prior expectations, largely due to our stronger first half performance. We anticipate minimal impact from inorganic activity and a tailwind of approximately 1 ppt from foreign exchange. As it relates to operating expenses, year-over-year growth is expected to remain at the low double digits range versus a year ago on a currency-neutral basis, excluding inorganic activity and special items. We expect a minimal impact from inorganic activity and a headwind of 0.5 to 1 ppt from foreign exchange on a full year basis. Other items to keep in mind. On other income and expense, in Q3, we expect an expense of approximately $125 million. This is higher sequentially, driven primarily by incremental interest expense related to our bond issuance in June. This excludes gains and losses on our equity investments, which are excluded from our non-GAAP metrics. And finally, we expect a non-GAAP tax rate in the range of 20% to 21% for both Q3 and Q4. And with that, I will turn the call back over to Devin.

Thank you. Julianne, you may now open the queue for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Ramsey El-Assal from Cantor Fitzgerald.

I wanted to ask you about stablecoins and agentic commerce sort of together. They're both sort of focus areas for -- you commented on it in your prepared remarks. Do you see use cases in agentic that will require stablecoins, something like micro transactions perhaps or again, traditional Mastercard credentials basically fulfill all the use cases that stablecoins can? I'm just trying to figure out whether there's a unique value proposition you're looking to solve for with stablecoins.

Right. Thank you for that question, Ramsey. So as we were laying out earlier, we're innovating around the future of payments. And these are 2 areas that will shape the future of payments, agentic commerce and stablecoins. Let me start off by talking just agentic commerce, and then we see how transactions can flow in agentic commerce. So there's your -- the consumer-oriented use cases in agentic commerce, where keyword search turns changes, and we may use agents for that. That could be an LLM, that could be a first-party agent by a large retailer. And there are transactions that are down and delegated to agents and that can happen very well through the existing card networks. So what you need for that is that's what merchants always need, they need reach, they need particular user experiences. That's the same. That's true for consumers. So we really believe that cards will prevail in that world. This is a tremendous opportunity for us also on the services side, through tokenization, inside tokens and so forth. We talked about this many times. The card infrastructure and the card ecosystem and the Mastercard proposition within that is unique. It's unique because we have additional capabilities that we put into the Agent Pay protocol from us and 1 of them is verifiable intent, which allows you to basically challenge a transaction, say, I never wanted to buy this. And then the chargeback process can kick back in. This was innovated together with Google. So there's some unique propositions here on the Agent Pay side, but it just basically comes back to the main point that cards can prevail there. Now if you look on the B2B side, you can see there's a range of agentic commerce transactions that can happen where you have an agent that does purchasing for a company that can very well happen on the card ecosystem very similar to what I just said on the consumer side. Amounts, speed, purposes, they will need the protections, they need the global reach, all of that can apply. And we believe that's a continued opportunity for us, particularly on the services side again. Now there could be an entirely new range of transactions, and that is machine-to-machine payments. That is low-ticket, micro ticket transaction that happened at a very high velocity. And for that, we can see a world emerging where different kind of underlying infrastructure is required. And for that, we've put out our protocol, which is an evolution of Agent Pay, which is Agent Pay for machines. This is the only network protocol that's out there today to facilitate that. Now the underlying infrastructure for that, we've mapped it out. You can start to see that there is a transaction that is recognized from one agent to another. These machines talking to each other. But the settlement happens in different kinds of rails. That could involve stablecoins, but it also could involve different types of settlements. We're actually quite open to that. But what it needs is the immediacy of these agents to recognize that transaction, and that is what Agent Pay for machine actually does. So there is a connect with stablecoins. You could see that stablecoins play a role, but not the only thing. Stablecoins on the other hand, for us is a separate topic generally, but will play a role in the financial ecosystem of the future, which is why we have been investing. Our current approach on stablecoins is really facilitating that you can spend your crypto balances if you still want to or your stablecoins balances, that you purchase the same. We facilitated settlement in our networks. If that is so wanted, we facilitate money movement using stablecoins to drive immediacy, really in transparency of cost. But it's also true that stablecoins isn't the answer to everything because you still need protections, you still need acceptance and you still need to kind of find your way into that. We expect the world of multiplicity, many coins, many chains. And all of that needs a trusted interoperable layer because people will transact across different coins and so forth. And that is what BVNK will do for us. Sachin mentioned it, we're going to -- we're expecting to close the BVNK acquisition. So that is another tremendous opportunity for us. Across the whole thing, there's still a services opportunity for us. That's a lot more than you asked for, Ramsey, but it is all very important, very, very excited about it. And the 2 topics very much for your questions, they do interlink.

Our next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW.

Congratulations again. Sachin, I have a question for you on the acceleration you saw in cross-order from April to June and into July. I know you mentioned the impact of the Middle East conflict being lower, but it seems like a pretty sizable lift. So I'm curious if the World Cup had any play in that and factored into that? And then should we expect some moderation and obviously, anything else to call out?

Sure, Sanjay. So a couple of things to actually talk to as it relates to the trends we saw between April, May and June. Certainly, you saw a recovery in terms of cross-border travel in the Middle East. Now just to give you a little bit of color as to what we're seeing in the Middle East, broadly speaking, so we did see better spending trends as it relates to outbound from the impacted GCC countries into other parts of the globe. Hard to identify whether that's necessarily tied to the World Cup or not, but we saw trends which were starting to actually present themselves across both consumer spending and commercial spending. So for me, the way I kind of think about it is greater confidence in terms of how people are actually doing that outbound spend. That's also tied by the way to increasing capacity from flights and airlines and things of that sort. So that's important to recognize. The other thing which has been supportive of cross-border during the quarter has been Venezuela. And I called this out in my prepared remarks. Important to understand what's going on there. I think all of you are aware that we deconsolidated our Venezuela operations in 2018, where we deconsolidated revenue and we deconsolidated volumes at that point in time, primarily due to the fact that it was a very challenged repatriation environment at that point in time. So the ability to actually get U.S. dollars from Venezuela was challenged. Well, what we've seen is actually very interesting because over the course of the first quarter and particularly going into the second quarter, there has become an increased availability of U.S. dollars in Venezuela. And what that's effectively meant is that consumers have greater access to U.S. dollars, and they're utilizing those U.S. dollars for the cross-border spending, mostly in what we call card-not-present ex travel. So that's less about travel. That's more about card-not-present ex travel. And those U.S. -- and also just to kind of just put a bow around it, we are the market leaders as it relates to Venezuela, and it's primarily a debit market. So that's where you're seeing that spend come through. So what you're seeing is the impact of both that more, I should say, lower than April effect, which came through in May and June as it relates to outbound travel from the Middle East, but what you're also seeing is the trends from Venezuela, which have been holding up pretty well, to be honest with you. So this is a competitive differentiator for us. We are the market leaders. And as you've seen the U.S. dollar availability come into play, you've seen that volume come through in terms of what we're seeing in card-not-present ex travel.

Our next question comes from Andrew Jeffrey from William Blair.

I wanted to add drill down perhaps a little bit, Michael, on some of the domestic switching comments you made. I think the UAE initiative, in particular, is pretty compelling. What other markets are you targeting for those kinds of solutions? And I wonder if given all of Mastercard's capabilities, Europe is potentially right despite their closed-loop initiatives for the same kind of solutions?

Great question. Important topic. So I want to take you back. I think it's slightly shorter than previous answer, I think. I'll make it -- I'll take you back to 2022 though. This was a time when we were in COVID, and we said with everything that's going on, it's important to invest in the resilience of our business. And we put a particular focus on our technology strategy. Really was the goal to allow us to run anything anywhere. So that's what we did at the time and drove modularity of our network. And that instance in the UAE is exactly that. So we're basically running a part of the switch in the UAE and it gives us access to transactions that we didn't have before. So it's a good partnership from that perspective, upside for us, but it gives that resilience and global technology to the UAE, tremendous partnership. It's not the only partnership, though, where we have that. We have different versions of that, but always coming back to. It has to work from a technology perspective. It has to work from an economics perspective, the give and take have to work for us. But then we can get access to more transactions, which fuel our virtuous cycle, as I said before. We've done something like this in South Africa, where we build a real-time payment switch that can actually carry anything. It can carry any ISO 2022 transaction, can carry a card transaction. So this is the kind of technology that we have or we are in the process of making available in Europe. Now Europe is a very competitive market with lots of payment choices for consumers there on the B2B side, on the card side. The digital euro is in the making. There's a lot going on in Europe. So we feel very good that we have this technology that allows us to partner in different ways. For now, we are very well positioned with our card proposition in Europe. You know we used to be Euro card. So we have deep European roots, and we're competing very effectively today. As far as there, these local alternatives, various local gyros and so forth, a lot of co-badge partnerships, we partner with the wallets, like Swish in Sweden, like Bizim in Spain. So wide set of options right now. At this point in time, we bring the most value through our card propositions, but we have the flexibility to do what we need to do should the time come and we find better engagement. So that's how I look at it. If you go into Asia, you see in the stand there are partnerships that we have with switches and so forth in other parts of the world. So this run anything anywhere concept is really important for us to see where the world is going, but always comes down to our economic principles, apply our services, economics and standard technology that we can use. So we don't have a 1,000 flours blue kind of landscape for us.

Our next question comes from Dan Dolev from Mizuho.

Great quarter. Congrats, Michael and Sachin. I have a question about specifically about cyber demand. So we think given what we're seeing in security software, Micos is driving very strong demand for cyber demand. Can you maybe unpack the upside to that for Mastercard because should be a pretty big catalyst in our view?

Right. So on the safety and security part of our portfolio -- great question, Dan. So you know we have gone much deeper than other market participants on the cyber side, recognizing that as the world digitizes faster. Clearly, that's an underlying growth driver for us, a tailwind for us. There is more demand. We initially started out in fraud. We're now in fraud and identity, and we're in cyber. That is the portfolio. Those are the 3 big categories. On the cyber side, we've strengthened our proposition with the addition of Recorded Future. So that's what the portfolio is. Currently, when you think about what is occupying the minds of CEOs with occupying the minds of directors in the Board room, it is cybersecurity. And the recent discussions around frontier models, and how do you go about them? Is it more of a threat, it's actually a helpful tool for us. You identify vulnerabilities in your company's technology. It's a bit of both. And we have been engaging from day 1 on that. So all of that put cyber into the kind of the center of the discussion. We have strong relationships with cyber and a lot of our customers really through the fraud side. So that is a natural growth path for us to engage the CECL and talk about the expanded capabilities that we have. While at the same time, the CEO talks the CISO and say, what are we doing to protect ourselves. So it all comes together in the moment, we're meeting the moment with this portfolio. When I was talking earlier about Threat Intelligence, here, with this ever-expanding threat landscape, it is almost impossible for any company to meet every fraud risk that, that potentially is. So what you really need to know is you have to have targeted information on how you might be targeted. And what is the vector, the threat vector that applies to you the most. So you can actually focus there. That's very much what Recorded Future does today. So if you take all of that together, I think we're in a good position here. As far as our own cybersecurity goes, of course, we have found that leveraging the latest frontier models help us accelerate identifying vulnerabilities. And we take those learnings and those best practices on how to do that and share that with our customers around the world. So that we can keep the whole ecosystem safer. So fundamentally, a strong trend for us. But let's not forget, it's not maybe that sexy, but everyday fraud. I'll give you that example on the $172 million of fraud prevented on malicious domains. All that is in powering our cybersecurity business today and it's attached to the transaction growth that we talked about all the transactions that we're going after. This is a flywheel that is very much needed right now. Obviously, fraud and cyber risks are not a good thing, but they happen to be a part of a business that we're very good at. So we're helping our customers with that.

Our next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

I want to ask about your -- it's a very important region for you. If I look at purchase volume, it used to grow in the mid-teens and now the growth has decelerated a little bit. Maybe talk about the drivers there in terms of macro, competitive environment, local dynamics. And I know there's a little bit of a smaller contribution from Maestro conversions as well. And how should we think about the growth in the region.

Harshita, I just want to make sure I'm clear as to which region you're talking about. I didn't pick up. You said Europe. Okay, Europe. So look, I mean yes, okay. Look, I mean, at the end of the day, our business in Europe continues to perform exceedingly well. We are very much in the space of working very closely with our customers to deliver a ton of value, and they're seeing that come through in the nature of the partnerships, which we've got there. I'm going to take you back a few years to talk a little bit about all the wins we had in Europe and because a lot of that kind of explains the trend which you're talking about right here. Because if you look at the trend in terms of purchase volumes in Europe, right? I mean, back in Q2 of 2024, we are growing at 16%. At that point in time, what you were seeing was the tailwind of all of these wins come through, whether it was Santander or the fact that we've got wins with NatWest or UniCredit, you name it, all of that stuff was coming through in those quarters, which was giving us a lift in terms of the share wins. Naturally, what's going to happen after that, if you're looking at comparative growth rates on a sequential basis, you're going to start to see the lapping effect of that come through. So that's certainly a factor which explains what's going on there. And then we've been pretty clear about what kind of deals we want to win and what kind of deals we're going to actually pursue. There have been deals which we have completed for, but we've done it within the realm of what we thought made good financial sense for us. And if it didn't work out, we've actually passed on it, for example, in Lloyd's Credit. We know we've deliberately actually decided to go to a certain point in time, after which you have to kind of make a call as to whether it makes economic sense or doesn't make economic sense for the company. And that's what we did. So you're seeing that come through as well in the nature of the roll-off of those volumes very much the case. That discipline is something we're going to adopt and have always adopted because it's really, really important for us. volume for the sake of volume is not what this company should be chasing. Profitable volume, which is going to drive higher net revenue yield is what we're going to chase. And we're going to do it in a manner, which works well for our partners to drive higher growth for our partners. So I'll just give you -- and you know this, but I'll just say this anecdotally, winning share of a portfolio which is growing at 1% helps me in the first year and then is a huge drag on growth for the years thereafter. And so if you can't really grow the portfolio, it doesn't really matter. So that is very much the philosophy we adopt. So I know you asked the question broadly around Europe and trends, but you also asked about the competitive environment. And hopefully, that gives you a little bit of color on the mindset that we adopt in terms of how we're actually running our business.

Our next question comes from Tien-Tsin Huang from JPMorgan.