Mastercard history

1967 Seventeen bankers meet in Buffalo, New York to form a federation for the reciprocal acceptance of their credit cards.

1968 The Master Charge name and graphics are adopted to provide stronger brand identification.

In 1969, Interbank developed a new national brand, "Master Charge: The Interbank Card" by combining the two overlapping yellow and orange circles of the Western States Bankcard Association with the "Master Charge" name coined by the First National Bank of Louisville, Kentucky.

The Access card system from the United Kingdom joined the ICA/Eurocard alliance in 1972.

In 1973, ICA developed INAS, a centralized computer network designed to electronically link the acquiring member or merchant to the issuing member or financial institution.

In 1974, ICA made the magnetic strip an international standard on all its cards in order to hasten authorization and reduce fraud.

In 1975, a system called INET was introduced to provide an electronic exchange of transactions among its members, thus reducing the necessity of actually mailing charge slips by automating the entire transaction process.

Before changing its name to Visa in 1977, BankAmericard had been issued under approximately 20 names around the world.

In February of 1980 the ICA board of directors appointed Russell E. Hogg, a former executive at Macmillan Inc. with extensive experience at American Express Company's Card Division, as the new president.

In 1981, the company introduced MasterCard Travelers Cheques and during the same year brought out the Gold MasterCard card, which was the first attempt by the company at market segmentation.

In 1983, MasterCard International Inc. became the first bank to use holograms as part of their card security.

In 1984, Hogg supervised the launching of Banknet, MasterCard's global packet-switching network that enables its international card acceptance locations to authorize transactions.

Since affinity cards had been such a huge success in Japan, in 1985 the Card Program Development Group was formed and immediately introduced the MasterCard BusinessCard for the international market.

In 1986, a MasterCard office was opened in Hong Kong, the first in the Pacific Rim region, and one year later MasterCard arranged to become the first credit card issued in the People's Republic of China.

In 1987, MasterCard became the first payment card to be issued in the People’s Republic of China.

Disagreement and competing interests within the board of directors itself prompted Hogg suddenly to resign in July of 1988.

In 1989, Hart supervised the launching of the MasterCard ATM Network.

In 1990, the MasterCard ATM Network was combined with CIRRUS to create the MasterCard/CIRRUS ATM Network.

MasterCard processed its first Maestro debit transaction in August 1992.

By the beginning of 1993, Visa's Interlink debit program was far ahead of MasterCard's program: Interlink counted more than 16 million debit cardholders while MasterCard reported only 800,000.

Worldwide acceptance of its credit cards, debit cards, and ATM network grew almost 10 percent in 1995, translating into the opening of over 3,000 new locations per day.

Both Mastercard and Visa have paid approximately $3 billion in damages resulting from a class-action lawsuit filed in January 1996.

By 1997 Europay was indeed more profitable; but Lockhart, too, resigned—ironically, to join BankAmerica Corporation, where Visa had been born.

on the Internet at: http://www.mastercard.comor write: MasterCard International, 2000 Purchase St, Purchase, NY, 10577

Introduced in 2001, MasterCard Advisors is a global consultancy program that tracks consumer behavior patterns and buying trends and provides other strategic solutions to help its members expand their businesses.

In 2002, MasterCard International merged with Europay International SA, another large credit-card issuer association, which for many years issued cards under the name Eurocard (payment card).

The company, which had been organized as a cooperative of banks, had an initial public offering on May 25, 2006, selling 95.5 million shares at $39 each.

In March 2012, MasterCard announced the expansion of its mobile contactless payments program, including markets across the Middle East.

Mastercard teamed with Apple in September 2014, to incorporate a new mobile wallet feature into Apple's new iPhone and Apple Watch models known as Apple Pay, enabling users to more readily use their Mastercard, and other credit cards.

MasterCard Inc. employs a total of 10,300 people as of 2015.

In July 2016, Mastercard introduced their new rebranding, along with a new corporate logo.

In August 2017, Mastercard acquired Brighterion, a Delaware Corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California that provides a portfolio of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

In 2018, Bloomberg News reported that Google had paid millions of dollars to Mastercard for its users' credit card data for advertising purposes.

In January 2019, Mastercard removed its name from its logo, leaving just the overlapping discs.

As of 2020, Mastercard ranked 191 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue.

The stock is traded on the NYSE under the symbol MA, with a market capitalization of $367.1 billion as of May 2021.