Mastercard Move Transactions Grow 35%, CEO Says Consumer Spending ‘Solid’

Contactless payments continue to be a preferred method for consumers, Mastercard’s latest quarterly results showed, while debit and credit spending remained intact despite cardholders’ worries about the economy.

Company materials that accompanied the Thursday (May 1) earnings release showed that gross dollar volumes were up 9% to $2.4 trillion; within the United States, credit and debit spending gained 7% overall.

Consumer Spending Is ‘Solid’

CEO Michael Miebach said on the conference call with analysts said that from a macro standpoint, “consumer and business sentiment has weakened, primarily due to concerns surrounding the impact from tariffs and geopolitical tensions. On the other hand, so far this year, the fundamentals that support consumer spending have been solid and our drivers are generally stable.”

As for the company’s own prospects, he said that “there’s a substantial opportunity for us to drive sustainable growth across consumer payments, commercial new payment flows and value added services and solutions.”

Miebach highlighted that 73% of all in-person switched transactions are contactless, and approximately 35% of all switched transactions are tokenized.

The CEO said 85% of Mastercard’s value-added services and solutions revenues are recurring in nature, while the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered decisioning (which enhances fraud scoring) has detected 40% more payments fraud versus the first quarter of last year.

Miebach said Mastercard Move has seen transaction growth of 35%, which has been borne aloft by payment use cases such as disbursements and payouts in the gig economy space.

Chief Financial Officer Sachin Mehra said during the call that cross-border volumes were up 15%, “in line with expectations and reflecting continued growth in both travel and non travel related cross border spending.” As for April, Mehra said, payments volumes have been generally stable, and cross-border volumes were up 16%.

“Consumer spending remains healthy,” said the CFO, who added that “the fundamentals that support consumer and business spending have been solid to date. Specifically, unemployment rates remain low and for the most part, wage growth continues to outpace the rate of inflation. At the same time, increased economic and geopolitical uncertainty has weakened sentiment and creates risks.”

Mastercard executives stressed that the diversification of the platform’s business is resilient, underpinning expectations that with continued healthy consumer metrics, net revenues should grow at the “high end,” per Mehra, of a range into the low teens percentage points.

Shares were 0.4% lower in early trading on Thursday.

Analysts touched on the potential for stablecoins, and in response Miebach said there needs to be some regulatory clarity with legislation that is moving through Congress.

“If you look at the role that we play today in the traditional card payment space, as we establish safety and security standards,” he said. “We provide interoperability. If you think about a world of stablecoins, you could start to see there’s a natural role emerging yet again for somebody like us who can provide trusted interoperability solutions, safety and security standards and a need for our services across identity questions, AML, KYC — you name it — across the board. So it’s a space that’s still emerging at this point in time.”

Asked about the outlook for consumer spending, Miebach told analysts that “we expect the consumer to remain engaged … we expect the consumer to appreciate experiences and spend experiences. And the one thing that’s to be said about an engaged consumer … the engaged consumer is using all the tools of the digital economy to make expense decisions and decide between discretionary and nondiscretionary spending.”

Miebach continued, “In our data, we don’t really see significant ‘upfronting’ of spending. So that’s not a trend that came through. In the U. S, we see generally stable spending.”

Added Miebach later in the call, “having a secular trend where payments move from cash and checks into digital is an underlying powerful secular trend that continues. And in economic ups and downs, this will continue.”