There has never been a more exciting or more promising moment to be part of the Mastercard community. Today, Mastercard does more than ever. Our expertise encompasses threat intelligence and economic analysis, cyber security and loyalty programming, open finance and fraud prevention. Of course, we still offer virtually every form of payment available, including agentic commerce and digital assets. All of it is backed by the Priceless promise of reliability and protection that our interlocking circles represent to people everywhere. 

Our strong and tested strategy enables us to consistently deliver excellence for our customers and meet the needs of a changing world around us. It’s a strategy designed for resilience as we navigate those changes and built to ensure we are both ready for the future and instrumental in shaping it.

Mastercard’s dynamism is built on core, enduring strengths that generate enormous potential. We unite the reach and interoperability that are essential for success in our digital future with the trust earned throughout our six decades of experience. Our payments network and trailblazing technology operates in milliseconds, drives local and international commerce, and secures the digital economy around the world.

Every transaction that touches our network generates unique data, protected by Mastercard, that drives our solutions and sharpens our differentiated services. This will only become more important as the age of artificial intelligence (AI) leaps ahead. With 15+ petabytes of structured, clean, usable data, Mastercard is at the forefront leading this work.

Our business model, strategically diversified across geographies, product capabilities and spend categories, further amplifies our resilience and enduring relevance. We’ve seen this bear out through successive rounds of payments innovation and changing regulatory environments. Consistently, Mastercard has succeeded and grown and emerged stronger. Today, our global acceptance footprint delivers a simple user experience and reliable result for more than 3.7 billion accounts. We connect hundreds of millions of acceptance locations and digital access points across more than 220 countries and territories.

We deliver what few others can—a trusted service that directly supports the needs and wants of everyday people and our customers—and we are not blown off course by shifting headwinds. That’s thanks to the skill and commitment of our people. Mastercard invests to ensure we have the best talent in the industry and the right talent for our times. Every day, more than 39,000 individuals come together, each adding their unique insight and experience, to drive our company forward and deliver for the people who count on us.

Standing on the strength of this foundation, Mastercard is flexing in new ways and growing in new areas. We innovate with purpose and foresight, strengthening the digital ecosystem and making payments better, faster and easier. We build relationships and create connections among an extensive ecosystem of partners to amplify our opportunity and impact—and theirs. Products evolve. Services expand. Trust grows. All of it enhancing our capacity to meet this moment and the next and powering limitless possibility. That’s why people and partners everywhere continue to choose Mastercard.

The proof of our success is evident in the outstanding performance and stockholder value Mastercard delivered once again in 2025. Across four strong quarters of growth, our gross dollar volume grew by 9%, with cross-border volume growth up 15% year-over-year on a local currency basis. We won hundreds of new issuing deals and expanded long-term relationships globally. We facilitated more than 175 billion transactions, each representing someone, a business owner or consumer, who entrusted us with the responsibility to protect their money and their data.

Through a year marked by periods of macroeconomic volatility and uncertainty, Mastercard demonstrated robust capability and reliability by keeping our eyes on what matters most. We focused on our customers, centering their needs in all we do. We deepened partnerships and advanced the next era of payments. We continued to make progress across each of our three strategic priority areas—core payments, commercial and new payment flows, and value-added services and solutions—driving our virtuous cycle forward. Payments generate data. More data strengthens our services. Better services attract more payments to our network, and the cycle spins on.

Last year, we continued momentum in consumer payments, securing big portfolio wins and renewals, including American Airlines, Japan Airlines, Capital One, Apple, Alipay and Yapi Kredi. Beyond wins, we continued to deliver value propositions that drive card usage and top-of-wallet status. In 2025, we premiered The Mastercard Collection and our new World Legend offering, putting a new stake in the ground for the affluent market. Across our customer base, we continued making digital payments more secure and seamless through tokenization. As of last December, we had tokenized nearly 40% of all switched transactions on our way to reaching 100% tokenization of e-commerce payments by 2030.

Mastercard’s volumes are outpacing growth in personal consumption expenditures as we capture the tailwinds from the shift to digital. The runway for growth on the consumer payments side continues to be substantial and expanding with both advanced and emerging economies recognizing faster digitalization as a force multiplier for growth.

We made real progress to capture the enormous commercial opportunity in 2025, with commercial credit and debit representing 13% of gross dollar volumes and 11% year-over-year local currency growth. With tools like our Mid-Market Accelerator, we’re closing critical capability gaps for SMEs. We’re helping businesses of all sizes update their practices across a variety of use cases, invoices, expenses, remittances and more, for a digital world. Our differentiated value propositions, extensive partnerships and global Mastercard Move network to transmit value seamlessly across 17 billion endpoints all position Mastercard to capitalize on the growth ahead.

Our groundbreaking services continued to set Mastercard apart while adding value to the digital ecosystem. For example, with On-Demand Decisioning, we’ve improved the transaction experience for both cardholders and issuers by providing real-time transaction approvals directly on our network, reducing false declines and bolstering resilience. From Mastercard Threat Intelligence to Mastercard Commerce Media, we extended the power of our data with new services that layer in value both on and beyond the transaction. This opens the door to new customer centers and extends our addressable market to new growth areas.

In 2025, we took our redesigned, upgraded network live in South Africa, delivering the near real-time switching capabilities necessary in today’s world. We continued expanding our acceptance footprint to more cities in China, navigating local requirements while creating value for all involved. We also doubled-down on our commitment to Europe’s resilience, including announcing new local data centers and continued investment in European technology and talent. We inaugurated a new Cyber Resilience Center in Saudi Arabia, our first in the Middle East, and expanded our Mission Control & Operations center in Mexico City to enhance customer service and network strength across Latin America and the Caribbean. All these developments reflect our commitment to prioritizing local needs while strengthening the Mastercard experience for everyone.

Just as important as what we achieved in 2025 is how we achieved it. The power of doing well by doing good continues to animate our business. Last year we achieved our decade-long goal of connecting 1 billion people and 65 million small businesses to the digital economy, expanding growth and opportunity in countries around the globe. Today, as we continue efforts to uplift communities and expand markets, we know access on its own is not enough. New entrants to the digital economy need support and security to benefit from its full potential. That’s why our new commitment is to connect and protect 500 million people and small businesses on their journey from financial inclusion to financial health by 2030.

We continue to build on this strong momentum as we move through 2026 and look to the long future ahead. Multiple engines for growth power our strategy and ensure our sustainability. Mastercard powers economies and empowers people. That’s an incredible responsibility that we take seriously, and we are committed to delivering for the communities we serve around the world.

Today’s Mastercard is global, headquartered in the United States, but with roots all around the world. For those in Europe who, like me, grew up with Eurocard, that business remains part of Mastercard’s DNA, its strength merged into and enhancing our network—locally and globally—since 2002. Everywhere our network reaches, we bring global investment and set standards that invigorate economies and deliver real value on a local level.

Even in a more fragmented and self-reliant world, global communication, cooperation and interoperability will remain essential ingredients for success. Local businesses can count on us to provision the trust, interoperability and network they need to grow and thrive. Governments welcome our partnership to help protect the digital economy. Security and trust will be the foundation of competitive, confident, futureforward economies. Growth will be grounded in global standards, committed to local strength and connected across ecosystems of value. No one does that better than Mastercard.

That’s why Mastercard is elemental to the new payments paradigm taking shape through the rapid adoption of AI and digital assets. The success and adoption of these innovations hinges on interoperability, and interoperability requires a network. That’s Mastercard.

We are at the forefront of setting standards and guidelines for responsible AI development and use in the digital age. Our commitments build on our long-standing data privacy and responsibility principles to wrap agentic transactions in trust and transparency. With Mastercard Agent Pay, we pioneered the technology and framework that makes agentic commerce possible, bringing together tokenized transactions, fraud tools, reach and rich data and insights. With Verifiable Intent, we can confirm that authorized agentic purchases made on our network are traceable to human instructions to buy. These tools will only become more critical as we make payments more intelligent and seamless for consumers. We’re also harnessing our data-driven insights to better support our customers with Mastercard Agent Suite, offering an array of customizable, fit-for-purpose agents to meet their specific needs.

Digital assets and blockchain are an important new form of value that are enhancing the payments ecosystem in tangible ways—bringing greater speed, expanding choice, building in smarts and flexibility. Here too, Mastercard is instrumental to driving acceptance, usability, confidence and interoperability. Our co-branded partnerships enable people to pay using their crypto holdings at the same point of sale terminal that processes a credit or debit charge, making payment easy for business owners and empowering consumer choice. We’ve enabled stablecoin use, including on Mastercard Move for crossborder payments and settlement, for businesses and individuals who opt to be paid that way. And, with our recent announcement of our intent to acquire BVNK, a leading platform for stablecoin infrastructure in more than 130 countries, we are positioning ourselves to continue to grow in this space, making us more interoperable, extending end-to-end and opening new use cases.

In a world with more options than ever, choice in how you pay and who you partner with is paramount. People need the tools and the freedom to make the choices that work best for them. It requires creativity and flexibility, but our ultimate goal is simple: no matter what form money takes, it needs to be trusted, accepted and usable everywhere.

Around the world, Mastercard supports prosperity, facilitates connection, unlocks opportunity and makes priceless experiences possible. All the things that matter most to people. For Dorcas, a small-holder farmer in Kenya, Mastercard is the digital identity and connection to the financial industry that she needs to grow her business. For many salon and beauty-shop owners across Latin America, Mastercard is the new way to secure the products they already use while building credit and reducing risk. For the people of Ukraine, Mastercard is on the frontlines of cyber defense, helping support the country’s digital economy.

You won’t see all the ways that we’re working, but we’re always there helping to secure all the ways people pay and get paid. We work every day to be the trust layer for the digital economy with protections that strengthen the system from the ground up. We protect data privacy, enhance cyber security, fight fraud and deliver on our promise that consumers won’t be held responsible for unauthorized transactions. We innovate to extend that trust and security to the new age of payments and provide the services that support success all around the world. With agility built into every aspect of our enterprise, resilience is our superpower.

As we look at all that lies ahead, we remain laser-focused on delivering for our customers and cardholders, just as we have been for the past 60 years. That focus, in turn, creates real value for economies around the world and for our stockholders. We are building a future where Mastercard is central to the payments ecosystem and a trusted part of people’s everyday lives—the electric charge coursing through the digital economy and bringing it to life.

I am honored to lead this team and this business during an era of so much opportunity, and I am grateful to all of you for supporting Mastercard and our mission.