Mastercard Outlines Strategy Driven by Stablecoins, Services
Incoming Mastercard Chief Financial Officer Ling Hai, who assumed that role Aug. 3, outlined a growth-focused capital allocation strategy that includes frontline sales, targeted acquisition and infrastructure expansion Thursday (Sept. 10) during the Goldman Sachs 2026 Communacopia + Technology conference.
Emphasizing Mastercard’s posture as a growth stock and a B2B technology provider, Hai detailed how the card network is adapting to shifts in consumer behavior, cross-border flows and emerging technologies such as agentic artificial intelligence.
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As AI platforms transform online discovery and purchasing, Hai highlighted the necessity of network credentials across human and autonomous transaction touchpoints.
“If we play this out another 10 years, 20 years, I still think that you’re going to have a mix of different commerce,” Hai said. “You have physical, in-person commerce, you’re going to have online commerce, you have agentic commerce. I think the secret ingredient of the network credential is we’ll be able to serve Mastercard credential, we’ll be able to serve in all these different verticals, whether it’s in-person, whether it’s online, whether it’s agentic.”
Another opportunity centers on sovereign switch modernization. Mastercard is addressing national payment sovereignty demands by acting as the underlying technology provider for domestic payment networks, Hai said. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a joint venture with the central bank’s AEP entity enables Mastercard to power the domestic Jaywan switch, capturing nearly 100% of local debit processing while layering on cybersecurity services. This is a blueprint Mastercard plans to replicate in other global markets.
Stablecoin and digital asset infrastructure is another opportunity for growth. Following its August acquisition of BVNK, Mastercard is embedding stablecoin orchestration and white-label wallet capabilities into its payments stack, Hai said. Hai emphasized high-value use cases in B2B settlement, cross-border remittances, programmable smart contracts and tokenized bank deposits.
Mastercard is also growing its value-added services and cyber defense offerings. Value-added services now account for about 40% of Mastercard’s net revenue, driven by data insights, advisory and fraud prevention, Hai said.
Leveraging its acquisition of Recorded Future, Mastercard introduced a network-integrated Threat Intelligence service to protect financial institutions against AI-driven cyber threats and dark web compromised credentials, phone numbers and addresses.
