What smart money is saying about Mastercard
MA · Financial Services · Financial - Credit Services · Market cap $427.73B
6 funds in our archive have pitched Mastercard — most recently Baillie Gifford US Equity Growth in June 2026.
Company profile
Mastercard Incorporated is a global technology firm specializing in providing transaction processing and a wide array of payment solutions, operating across the United States and internationally. Its core business centers on enabling the entire payment transaction lifecycle – including authorization, clearing, and settlement – alongside offering a spectrum of complementary payment services. The company provides a comprehensive suite of integrated products and value-added services to a diverse clientele, which includes individual account holders, merchants, financial institutions, businesses, governments, and other organizations. These offerings span programs enabling deferred payment credit, prepaid card management services, commercial credit and debit solutions, and tools for accessing funds in deposit and other accounts. Additionally, Mastercard offers advanced cyber and intelligence solutions designed to secure transactions for all participants, and provides proprietary insights derived from the responsible utilization of consumer and merchant data. For online merchants, its specialized offerings encompass analytics, experimental "test and learn" platforms, consulting, managed services, loyalty programs, payment processing, and secure gateway technologies. The company also operates open banking and digital identity platforms. Its prominent payment solutions are delivered under the MasterCard, Maestro, and Cirrus brands. Established in 1966, Mastercard Incorporated is headquartered in Purchase, New York.
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34
Reported positions
10
Bought
4
Sold
42
Letters
Position history
Between Q4 2025 and Q2 2026, 34 fund letters reported a position in Mastercard — 10 opened or added to the position, 4 trimmed or exited.
| Quarter | Letters | Bought | Sold | Theses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2 2026 | 25 | 8 | 4 | 5 |
| Q1 2026 | 7 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| Q4 2025 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Fund activity · 34 positions · 14 moves
- June 2026
“We substantially increased our investments in Visa and Mastercard on the basis described above.”
Mastercard - TrimmedAlluvium Global Fund ConventumJune 2026
“Quarterly Purchases Table 3: Quarterly Sales Activity Quarterly Purchases Copart Initial Position Liberty Capital Increase Position HCA Healthcare Increase Position McKesson Increase Position Quarterly Sales Linamar Decrease Position Visa Decrease Position Mastercard Decrease Position Group 1 Automotive Decrease Position”
Mastercard - HoldsAve Maria FundsJune 2026
Listed in Ave Maria Funds’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - New positionFundsmith Equity FundJune 2026
“We began accumulating stakes in AppLovin, GE Vernova, Legrand, Mastercard, Netflix, Nextpower, Sage, The TJX Companies, TSMC, Uber, Veeva Systems, and Yum! Brands.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“Financials were another detractor. Our investments in financial-market infrastructure, including Deutsche Boerse, London Stock Exchange Group and B3, as well as payments companies Visa and Mastercard, trailed both the benchmark and asset-heavy global and European banks.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“Financials were another detractor. Our investments in financial-market infrastructure, including Deutsche Boerse, London Stock Exchange Group and B3, as well as payments companies Visa and Mastercard, trailed both the benchmark and asset-heavy global and European banks.”
Mastercard - TrimmedLiontrust Global Alpha FundJune 2026
“Within the financials sector, a combination of limited upside to our current price targets and a declining T-Score in our risk systems led us to reduce the overall exposure by selling out of Mastercard, ICICI Bank and The London Stock Exchange.”
Mastercard - New positionBaillie Gifford US Equity GrowthJune 2026
“We have continued to broaden the portfolio's enduring growth exposure with new purchases in IDEXX and Mastercard.”
Mastercard - June 2026
Listed in Buffalo Funds Growth Fund’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - June 2026
“We own Index constituents such as Charles Schwab, JP Morgan, Mastercard and Progressive Corp. that continue to grow their earnings per share at healthy rates and in some cases at higher rates than usual, but whose stock prices are lagging.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“It was an unusual quarter from a performance attribution perspective. Information Technology (IT) was the only sector in the Index to outperform the Index, accounting for two-thirds of its total gain. The Fund’s entire 156bps shortfall relative to the Index could be attributed either to weak stock selection in IT, which detracted 279bps, or to weak stock selection in Financials, which cost an additional 227bps. Somehow, all 11 of our holdings classified as Financials, including Visa and Mastercard , which we view as digital railroads, and MSCI , Moody’s , and S&P Global , which we view as business services, detracted from our relative returns during the quarter.”
Mastercard - New positionPershing SquareJune 2026
“Earlier this year, we initiated positions in Visa and Mastercard, two businesses we have long admired, which provide the dominant global networks for consumer and commercial payments, with an increasing share of revenue growth coming from value-added services.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“FUND MANAGEMENT TOP 10 HOLDINGS (%)* NVIDIA Corporation 12.66 Apple, Inc. 9.05 Microsoft Corporation 7.94 Alphabet, Inc. 6.34 Amazon.com, Inc. 5.16 Broadcom, Inc. 4.03 Meta Platforms, Inc. 3.23 Eli Lilly and Company 2.44 Mastercard, Inc. 1.64 Visa, Inc. 1.57 Top 10 Holdings Total 54.06 FUND FACTS Inv. Inst. Ticker BUFEX BUIEX”
Mastercard - HoldsBaron Financials ETFJune 2026
Listed in Baron Financials ETF’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - AddedMontaka Global FundJune 2026
“Portfolio Positioning In the June quarter, Montaka made some targeted changes to the portfolio. We substantially increased our investments in Visa and Mastercard on the basis described above.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“We used the share price declines to build and add to positions.”
Mastercard - June 2026
“In the first half of 2026, Visa and Mastercard found themselves where ASML stood at its lows: trading at their lowest multiples in over a decade, having underperformed by roughly the same 40% over the prior year, as investors feared that stablecoins and AI-agent payments would route transactions around the card networks entirely, compounded by proposed US interest rate caps on credit cards. Visa and Mastercard operate the two dominant global payment networks, connecting billions of cards to over a hundred million merchants. This entrenched duopoly − protected by network effects no rival has replicated at scale − allows them to collect a small toll on a vast share of the world's electronic transactions. We think it is likely that agentic commerce will run on this existing, trusted payment infrastructure, so to the extent that AI reshapes online shopping, it could prove an accelerant to their growth rather than a threat. We used the share price declines to build and add to positions.”
Mastercard - HoldsAkre Focus ETFJune 2026
“Recent examples of AI adoption, monetization, or lack of AI-related disruption among our portfolio companies include: • CCC Intelligent Solutions (CCC): $120 million annualized revenue run-rate (ARR) from its Emerging Solutions’ products of which AI is the largest contributor. The company’s Emerging Solutions revenue grew 50% year-over-year. • Salesforce (CRM): Agentforce + Data 360 (key AI products) ARR up 225% to $3.4 billion in Q1 (119% organic). • ServiceNow (NOW): raised 2026 AI revenue guidance by 50% from the prior quarter; announced $300 million in cost savings from internal AI adoption; gross dollar retention steady at 98%. • Constellation Software: no material customer losses to “AI-native” startups across their portfolio of ~1,500 vertical market software companies. • Fair Isaac (FICO): has filed 137 AI-based patents. Second Quarter 2026 Akre Capital Management, LLC | 2 West Marshall Street, Middleburg, Virginia 20117 | 540-687-3880 | akrecapital.com | akrefund.com • CoStar Group (CSGP): Launched Homes Ai and Apartments.com Ai, adding conversational natural language search capabilities to its leading home and apartment online portals and leveraging the company’s unmatched proprietary property data and imagery. • Moody’s (MCO): Rated over $100 billion in AI-related debt issuance during Q1; expanded distribution of its decision intelligence analytics into enterprise AI environments such as Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Azure, etc. • Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V): have been pioneering and productizing AI since the 1990s when it was called “machine learning”; just starting to monetize their tokenization technology that secures over 50% of ecommerce transactions and will prove crucial for AI-powered “agentic” commerce in the future.”
Mastercard Listed in Sustainable Growth Advisers U.S. Large Cap Growth Strategy’s reported holdings.
Mastercard- June 2026
“These buys were funded by the sales including Trimble, reducing overall software and long-duration growth and – within the financials sector – Mastercard and ICICI Bank, due to a combination of limited upside to our current price targets and a declining T-Score in our risk system.”
Mastercard - TrimmedLiontrust Balanced FundJune 2026
“Within the financials sector, a combination of limited upside to our current price targets and a declining T-Score in our risk systems led us to reduce the overall exposure by selling out of Mastercard, ICICI Bank and The London Stock Exchange.”
Mastercard - AddedMayar CapitalJune 2026
“We added to a number of existing holdings: Nike, Toast, SAP, Unilever, Mastercard, Nintendo and Booking.”
Mastercard “Quality compounders form the foundation of the Portfolio and include Stryker (SYK), Mastercard (MA), Marsh (MRSH), and Sherwin- Williams (SHW).”
Mastercard- June 2026
“Quality compounders form the foundation of the Portfolio and include Stryker (SYK), Mastercard (MA), Aon PLC (AON), and Sherwin-Williams (SHW),”
Mastercard - June 2026
Listed in Weitz Investments Partners III Opportunity Fund’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - HoldsFlexible Equity FundMarch 2026
Listed in Flexible Equity Fund’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - March 2026
“For the strategy, these include our investments in payments companies Visa and Mastercard, credit bureaus Experian and Equifax (both initiated in 2025), software companies Microsoft, Autodesk, and Workday (we exited Intuit during the quarter), and one of our Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI) investments the London Stock Exchange Group. Our other FMI investments—Deutsche Boerse and B3— have very little risk of AI disintermediation and have instead benefited from market volatility year-to-date, positively contributing to portfolio returns. The bear case for AI—replacing companies, potentially entire industries, and negatively impacting long-term white-collar unemployment—has been widely referred to as the “AI death star”. Whilst we do believe the bear case encompasses real risks, the market appears to be oversimplifying it. At the end of the first quarter, we had conducted drawdown reviews on all the aforementioned companies. The Global Leaders drawdown process forms an integral part of capital allocation and risk management for the Fund, and we place strong emphasis on avoiding losers as a key driver of long-term performance. Drawdown reviews trigger actions within the portfolio (we either add to positions or exit), and present an opportunity to reallocate to opportunities with better probability-adjusted IRRs, either within the portfolio or from the ready-to-buy list. We added to all the aforementioned companies and exited one investment: US tax and back-office software company Intuit.”
Mastercard - March 2026
Listed in Buffalo Blue Chip Growth Fund’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - HoldsBuffalo Growth FundMarch 2026
“FUND MANAGEMENT TOP 10 HOLDINGS (%)* NVIDIA Corporation 12.20 Alphabet, Inc. 11.82 Microsoft Corporation 11.22 Amazon.com, Inc. 8.79 Apple, Inc. 8.21 Meta Platforms, Inc. 5.46 Broadcom, Inc. 3.61 Visa, Inc. 2.71 Mastercard, Inc. 2.54 Booking Holdings, Inc. 2.02 Top 10 Holdings Total 68.58 FUND FACTS Inv. Inst. Ticker BUFGX BIIGX”
Mastercard - March 2026
“Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. United States 2.0 Insurance Mastercard Inc. United States 3.6 Financial Services”
Mastercard - March 2026
“Portfolio Holdings Data as of March 31, 2026. Source: FactSet, Hardman Johnston Global Advisors LLC®. The data shown is of a representative portfolio for the Hardman Johnston Select Equity strategy and is for informational purposes only and is not indicative of future portfolio characteristics/returns. Actual results may vary for each client due to specific client guidelines and other factors. The representative portfolio was chosen as most representative of the Select Equity strategy. Future investments may or may not be profitable. C ountry We ig ht ( %) Indus try Communicat ion Serv ices 8.1 Alphabet Inc. United States 7.1 Interactive Media & Services Comcast Corp. United States 0.9 Diversified Telecommunication Services Versant Media Group, Inc. United States 0.1 Media Consumer Discret ionary 2.7 SharkNinja, Inc. United States 2.7 Household Durables Consumer St aples 0.8 Estee Lauder Companies Inc. United States 0.8 Personal Care Products Energy 1.9 Cameco Corporation Canada 1.9 Oil, Gas & Consumable Fuels Financials 9.7 Charles Schwab Corp United States 3.0 Capital Markets Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. United States 3.0 Insurance Mastercard Inc. United States 3.8 Financial Services”
Mastercard - March 2026
“We did differentiate and avoided ALL banks while making Mastercard one of our largest positions. Its average weight in 2009 was approximately 6.5% in Large Cap and approximately 9.7% in Focus and Focus Plus. Mastercard has delivered a nearly 23% gross compounded annual return during the 17 plus years we have owned it versus 14.1% for the S&P 500 over that same time period. Our money weighted return is even better because, following our investment discipline, we have added to it when it was more discounted and trimmed it when it became more fully valued.”
Mastercard - HoldsAkreDecember 2025
Listed in Akre’s reported holdings.
Mastercard - HoldsPlatinium Asset ManagementDecember 2025
Listed in Platinium Asset Management’s reported holdings.
Mastercard
Also mentioned · 7
These funds discuss Mastercard — as a competitor, benchmark or comparable — without disclosing a position in it.
- July 2026
“• Agentic commerce. Whilst we have our various doubts as to why agentic commerce will not be adopted quite as fast as its leading proponents suggest, the networks are not passive bystanders.5 Visa has launched its Intelligent Commerce Platform and Trusted Agent Protocol; Mastercard has Agent Pay.”
Mastercard - MentionedBrasada CM Brasada Private AccountsJune 2026
“the example below of Micron (a historically cyclical memory business) and Mastercard (a historically secular payments company) may help explain the different concepts here:”
Mastercard - MentionedVision Capital FundJune 2026
“New Fund Write-ups We wrote two new memos in Q2 2026 on Tencent Holdings (HK: 700) and Mastercard (MA).”
Mastercard - MentionedOptimist FundJune 2026
“Affirm has been profitable (on a GAAP basis) for only eighteen months which is too brief to be seen as a blue-chip payments franchise like Visa or Mastercard.”
Mastercard - MentionedFiduciary Management FMI FundsJune 2026
“Capital One Financial Corp (COF) – Large Cap/Global Funds Capital One is one of the largest banks and card issuers in the U.S. Our investment thesis centers on Capital One’s acquisition of Discover. Meaningful value creation could come from cost synergies and converting a portion of Capital One’s card portfolio to Discover’s network. Importantly, these synergies require no additional capital or credit risk and should increase returns while reducing earnings cyclicality relative to Capital One on a standalone basis. Over the longer term, there is a potentially game-changing opportunity to build a more competitive network to challenge Visa and Mastercard.”
Mastercard - MentionedManole Capital Investor NewsletterMarch 2026
“Networks such as Visa and Mastercard have succeeded not by changing consumer behavior, but by embedding themselves invisibly into it.”
Mastercard - MentionedManole CapitalDecember 2025
“Payments & Stablecoins: Payments have traditionally been an area that prefers to move slowly. We often say that payments are more evolutionary than revolutionary, but that pattern is beginning to change. The gradual removal of paper checks and the decision to stop minting pennies illustrate how the system is finally moving away from outdated processes. At the same time, real-time payment networks continue to expand, and online and mobile transactions are gaining share across all demographics. Stablecoins are becoming a meaningful part of this evolution. They offer faster settlement, improved efficiency, and lower operational friction for businesses that move significant volumes of money each day. Major payment companies and financial institutions are actively exploring stablecoin pilots that enable instant payouts and real-time funding, particularly for cross- border and high-frequency transactions. The enduring appeal of card payments is their universality. Consumers trust that Visa and Mastercard will be accepted globally, allowing transactions to occur quickly and seamlessly, particularly on mobile devices.”
Mastercard
Fund coverage · 6 theses
- Baillie Gifford US Equity GrowthJune 2026
Mastercard benefits from the secular shift away from cash and from a trusted, ubiquitous, capital-light network with high margins and strong returns.
Read the full thesis - Pershing SquareJune 2026
Mastercard operates a dominant global payments network with strong growth, expanding value-added services, and durable moat-like economics.
Read the full thesis - Montaka Global FundJune 2026
Mastercard is an extraordinarily advantaged payments network with durable double-digit revenue growth and underappreciated long-term growth from value-added services.
Read the full thesis - Fundsmith Equity FundJune 2026
Mastercard operates a global payments network with powerful network effects and long runway from cash-to-digital migration and B2B payments.
Read the full thesis - Vision Capital FundJune 2026
Mastercard is a highly profitable payments network with powerful secular tailwinds from cash-to-digital migration and growing value-added services.
Read the full thesis - Appalaches CapitalMarch 2026
Mastercard is a scaled, low-cost global payments network with strong competitive advantages and minimal long-term risk from regulation or AI, and is positioned to benefit from innovation and international growth.
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