Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript July 27, 2023

Mastercard Incorporated beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.56, expectations were $2.55.

Operator: Good morning. My name is Audra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Mastercard Inc. Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Mr. Devin Corr, Head of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Devin Corr: Thank you, Audra. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. With me today are Michael Miebach, our Chief Executive Officer; and Sachin Mehra, our Chief Financial Officer. Following comments from Michael and Sachin, the operator will announce your opportunity to get into the queue for the Q&A session. It is only then that the queue will open for questions. You can access our earnings release, supplemental performance data and the slide deck that accompany this call in the Investor Relations section of our website, mastercard.com. Additionally, the release was furnished with the SEC earlier this morning. Our comments today regarding our financial results will be on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis unless otherwise noted.

Both the release and the slide deck include reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP reported amounts. Finally, as set forth in more detail in our earnings release, I’d like to remind everyone that today’s call will include forward-looking statements regarding Mastercard’s future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Information about the factors that could affect future performance are summarized at the end of our earnings release and in our recent SEC filings. A replay of this call will be posted on our website for 30 days. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Miebach.

Michael Miebach: Thank you, Devin. Good morning, everyone. So starting with the big picture. Our momentum continued into the second quarter with net revenue up 15% and operating income up 16%, both versus a year ago on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis, once again demonstrating the strong fundamentals of our business. Consumer spending has remained resilient with spend on experiences and travel remaining a focus. On the macroeconomic front, we continue to monitor a number of factors. First, the overall labor market remains strong, including wage growth, and consumers continue to be supported by credit and savings. These are key factors of consumer spending. Second, the efforts of central banks to curb inflation are showing signs of progress.

Despite this, inflation remains elevated, and we are in a period of tight monetary policy across many countries. Economic growth will continue to vary country by country and sector by sector. Looking at our switched volume trends. Domestic volume growth remains healthy. We continue to see strength in T&E with some recent moderation in both inflation and spend in select international markets. Cross-border travel continues to show strength, reaching 154% of 2019 levels in the second quarter. We remain well positioned to capitalize on this trend with our travel-oriented portfolios and our initiatives in areas like loyalty and marketing. Cross-border card-not-present ex travel continues to hold up well. We’re monitoring the environment closely and are ready to adjust investment levels as appropriate while maintaining focus on our key strategic priorities.

As a reminder, these priorities are: one, expanding in payments; two, extending our services; and three, embracing new networks. First, we’re expanding in payments by continuing to win deals with a diverse set of customers, powering growth and acceptance, capturing a prioritized set of new payment flows, and exploring new ways to ensure payment choice by leveraging multiple alternatives, including card rails, ACH, blockchain and open banking. Back to the top of this list. We are winning deals across the globe through a combination of our innovative products, differentiated services and our solution-selling approach. I’ll share a few examples from each region. Let’s start in Europe, where we announced a significant win with UniCredit across all card products.

We expanded our partnership and put in place a first-of-its-kind, single-card, multi-market strategy spanning 13 banks, 12 markets and 20 million cards. UniCredit selected Mastercard due to our innovative digital capabilities, shared focus on sustainability and proven ability to support their client needs. In Germany, the previously announced conversion of approximately 10 million of Deutsche Bank’s credit and debit cards to Mastercard has now started. These wins build on our prior success in the U.K., where there are now 16 million NatWest Debit Mastercards live in market. When combined with the Santander and First Direct migrations, approximately 27 million debit cards have now shifted to Mastercard across these 3 portfolios in the U.K. Turning to North America.

Mastercard will partner with Fiserv’s money network for all U.S. state and federal government benefit and wage disbursement debit programs. Up north, Coast Capital, Canada’s largest Federal credit union, will be converting their consumer and small business portfolios to Mastercard. The partnership highlights our shared commitment to local communities with issuance through Collabria Financial Services. In addition, we have a new agreement with Tim Hortons, the largest quick-service restaurant brand in Canada. Tim Hortons will launch a new Mastercard credit card and will be using a broad set of Mastercard’s digital, analytics and fraud services and technologies. Our relationship with Santander in Latin America continues to grow. In Mexico, we established a long-term exclusive deal with Openbank, their new digital bank.

We also renewed the Fiesta Rewards co-brand credit card, Santander’s key offering within their consumer portfolio. In Brazil, we will be Santander’s exclusive partner across their commercial portfolio. And we’ve expanded our partnership with fast-growing Sicredi, one of Brazil’s largest credit unions. In Asia Pacific, we’ve extended our relationship with Standard Chartered Bank, which will enable us to grow our consumer credit presence across key markets in the region. We’ve also expanded our partnership with HSBC through the launch of the Travel One Card in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Travel One will provide instant in-app rewards redemption powered by the Mastercard Rewards system. With all of these cards, people do need a place to use them.

We continue to power growth and acceptance by establishing new partnerships and scaling new technologies. This quarter, we announced partnerships with both Alipay and WeChat Pay to enable international travelers to easily link any Mastercard credit or debit card to Alipay and WeChat Pay digital wallets. The partnership allows visitors to make payments with tens of millions of QR code merchants across China. I just returned from China, where I saw firsthand how this is helping international travelers shop and pay in more places in a simple way. It’s like paying like a local. And this will be valuable as inbound cross-border travel to China improves from approximately 50% of 2019 levels in the second quarter. In the online environment, we are scaling our Click to Pay capability to enhance the guest checkout experience.

Click to Pay transactions grew over 70% year-over-year in the second quarter, and the technology is now live in 30 markets. In the quarter, we added Chile, Bahrain and Slovakia. And NatWest Group became the first bank in the U.K. to go live with Click to Pay push provisioning for cardholders. Shifting to New Payment Flows. We are making tangible progress in this area. In commercial point of sale, we’ve extended our partnership with Brex to support the international expansion of their commercial portfolios. We expanded our relationship with myPOS continuing to drive new merchant acceptance across more than 30 European markets while also migrating their small business debit portfolio to Mastercard. And we’ve established an exclusive partnership with Australian lender, Grow Finance, to introduce credit cards to their small business customers later this year.

In B2B accounts payable, we remain the market leaders in virtual card. We continue to drive growth by tapping into new use cases. For example, we established an exclusive partnership with EasyTransfer in Greater China. This competitive flip leverages our virtual card capabilities to support cross-border tuition payments for international students. We’re also making it easy for buyers and suppliers to integrate virtual cards into the technology platforms they already use. Building on our prior announcements with SAP and Coupa, we’ve recently partnered with GEP to integrate our virtual card technology into their payables platform. And on the supplier side, we launched Mastercard Receivables Manager with Billtrust. The solution streamlines the processing of virtual card transactions for suppliers and automates the integration of reconciliation data into accounts receivable systems.

This is a great solution. And it builds on partnerships with companies like Boost Payment Solutions, who have been working closely with Mastercard to expand and optimize commercial acceptance. And finally, in new flows, we continue to deploy our disbursement and remittances capabilities in new ways and across new geographies. In the U.S., we partner with top sports gaming processor, Interchecks, who will make Mastercard Send available to gaming operators for payouts. Careem Pay, one of the largest digital wallets in UAE, will use Send to top up their wallets using Mastercard. And on the cross-border front, we partnered with Al Fardan Exchange in Qatar to facilitate remittance services and support cross-border travel. Our work in real-time ACH continues to support these new flows.

Our circular approach has been to expand our infrastructure reach into new markets. Going forward, we will be focusing on delivering and scaling in the markets we already are serving while building applications and services in these key locations, in line with our overall strategic and financial objectives. And in blockchain, we’re introducing the MasterCard Multi-Token Network, MTN. MTN is a set of foundational capabilities designed to make transactions within digital asset and blockchain ecosystems, more secure, scalable and interoperable. We believe in the potential of blockchain technologies. However, regulated money, such as bank deposits and CBDCs, need to be part of the solution, and they should interoperate with traditional systems.

We can help with that. MTN is the natural evolution of the work we have already done in this space. The initial sandbox will kick off in the U.K. this summer. Now turning to services. Our services inform decision-making of our customers. They help them create stronger connections and greater loyalty. Payments and services reinforce each other, multiplying our impact and the value we deliver to all our partners. Our services help many — drive many of the wins I mentioned earlier. So here are a few additional examples. We recently launched our Consumer Fraud Risk solution, which leverages our latest AI capabilities and the unique network view of real-time payments I just mentioned to help banks predict and prevent payment scams. AI is a foundational technology used across our business and has been a game changer in helping identify such fraud patterns.

We’ve partnered with 9 U.K. banks, including Barclays, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Monzo and TSB to stop scam payments before funds leave a victim’s account. TSB, one of the first banks to adopt the solution, indicated that it has already dramatically increased its fraud detection since deploying the capability. We’re combining our loyalty, consulting, analytics and identity services in different ways to help our customers capitalize on the travel recovery. This quarter, we extended our broad-based partnership with Expedia Group. Together, we will combine Mastercard’s loyalty solution with Expedia’s extensive travel supply to enable Mastercard cardholders to book travel using loyalty points. We also partnered with Thomas Cook in India to issue prepaid cards for international travel.

The proposition includes cardholder access to over 450 cross-border travel offers through Mastercard Travel Rewards. And earlier this month, I met with our partners at Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa in Frankfurt. We resigned our long-standing partnerships with Lufthansa Group for its Miles & More loyalty program and welcomed Deutsche Bank as the new issuing partner. In this enhanced relationship, you will see a combination of our loyalty solutions, personalization capabilities and digital user experiences help the partnership take off to the next level using airlines peak. We’re also leveraging our personalization in Test & Learn capabilities to help our partners across the ecosystem enhance the customer experience and improve acquisition and conversion rates.

For example, the combined Dynamic Yields personalization capabilities with our marketing services to drive digital customer acquisition for Ecobank in Nigeria. In addition, HP Inc. has partnered with us to deploy personalized bank content for their consumers across Canada and Europe. And on the merchant side, we are working with 7-Eleven in Australia using our Test & Learn capabilities to support their rollout of new store concepts and evolve its food and beverage offerings. Our third strategic priority area is embracing new networks with a focus on open banking and digital identity. We continued to make progress in open banking and established a series of new and expanded collaborations this quarter, including ones with Freddie Mac, Algon based out of France and Dapi in the UAE.

These entities will leverage our smart and consumer permission data to drive increased financial inclusion and make digital interaction simpler and safer. Turning to digital identity. We’re driving adoption across several new verticals, including travel, ticketing, retail and financial institutions. Travel provider, FlightHub, is using our identity solutions to help travelers book their new next adventure. Sports teams across the U.S., including the New Jersey Devils, use these solutions to enable fans to buy tickets while reducing fraud on ticketing platforms. Major League Baseball used our NuDetect technology to ensure that All-Star votes were authentic for this year’s All-Star game. In retail, we partner with IKEA, who is using Ekata to help reduce friction and fraud.

And financial institutions like Greenwood, a digital banking platform for Black and Latinx communities are using our capabilities to authenticate consumers in real time, making financial empowerment a reality for more people. So in summary, we delivered another strong quarter of revenue and earnings growth, supported by resilient consumer spending, particularly in travel and experiences. Our strong deal momentum continues with new wins and expanded relationships powered by our services across a range of partners, including UniCredit, Fiserv, Tim Hortons, Brex and many more. Our differentiated capabilities, diversified business model and focused strategy positions us well to capitalize on the significant opportunity ahead. Sachin, over to you.

Sachin Mehra: Thanks, Michael. So turning to Page 3, which shows our financial performance for the quarter on a currency-neutral basis, excluding special items and the impact of gains and losses on our equity investments. Net revenue was up 15%, reflecting resilient consumer spending and the continued recovery of cross-border travel as well as the continued growth in our value-added services and solutions. Operating expenses increased 13%, including a minimal impact from acquisitions. And operating income was up 16%, including a minimal impact from acquisitions. Net income and EPS increased 11% and 14%, respectively, both reflecting a sizable discrete tax expense this quarter related to foreign tax legislation enacted in Brazil.

EPS of $2.89 includes a $0.22 reduction due to the discrete tax expense I just mentioned and an $0.08 contribution from share repurchases. During the quarter, we repurchased $2.4 billion worth of stock and an additional $497 million through July 24, 2023. So let’s turn to Page 4, where you can see the operational metrics for the second quarter. Worldwide gross dollar volume, or GDV, increased by 12% year-over-year on a local currency basis. In the U.S., GDV increased by 6% with credit growth of 8% and debit growth of 3%. Outside of the U.S., volume increased 16% with credit growth of 14% and debit growth of 17%. Of note, we have now completed the NatWest debit migration in the U.K. Overall, cross-border volume increased 24% globally for the quarter on a local currency basis, reflecting continued improvement in travel-related cross-border spending.

While this is sequentially lower versus Q1, this is due to tougher comps as we opened up post-Omicron last year. When you look at the trend versus 2019, you see continued strength. For example, cross-border travel is at 154% of 2019 levels in Q2, which is up 6 ppt from the prior quarter. On the same basis, cross-border card-not-present excluding travel continues to hold up well in relation to 2019 levels, up 2 ppt from the prior quarter to 210%. Turning to Page 5. Switched transactions grew 17% year-over-year in Q2. Both card-present and card-not-present growth rates remained strong. Card-present growth was aided in part by increases in contactless penetration as contactless now represents over 60% of all in-person switched purchase transactions.

In addition, card growth was 8%. Globally, there are 3.2 billion Mastercard and Maestro-branded cards issued. Turning to Slide 6 for a look into our net revenues for the second quarter, which came in above our expectations. As a reminder, earlier this year, we revised our disaggregated revenue disclosure. Net revenues are now broken down into 2 new categories: payment network and value-added services and solutions. Now getting into the numbers described on a currency-neutral basis. Payment network net revenue increased 15% primarily driven by domestic and cross-border transaction and volume growth and also includes growth in rebates and incentives. Payment network net revenue was higher than anticipated primarily due to higher revenues related to FX volatility and the timing of planned deal activity.

Value-added services and solutions net revenue increased 16% primarily due to the continued healthy growth of our Cyber & Intelligence solutions driven by our underlying driver growth and the demand for our fraud and security solutions, and strong demand for consulting and marketing services, which was partially offset by other solutions. Now let’s turn to Page 7 to discuss key metrics related to the payment network, again, described on a currency-neutral basis, unless otherwise noted. Looking quickly at each key metric. Domestic assessments were up 11%, while worldwide GDV grew 12%. The difference is primarily driven by mix. Cross-border assessments increased 29%, while cross-border volumes increased 24%. The 5 ppt difference is primarily due to favorable mix as higher-yielding ex intra-Europe cross-border volumes grew faster than intra-Europe cross-border volumes this quarter.

Transaction processing assessments were up 16%, while switched transactions grew 17%. The 1 ppt difference is primarily due to lower revenues related to FX volatility versus the prior year. Other network assessments related to licensing, implementation and other franchise fees were $270 million this quarter. As a reminder, these other network assessments may fluctuate from period to period. Moving on to Page 8. You can see that on a non-GAAP currency-neutral basis, excluding special items, total adjusted operating expenses increased 13% primarily due to increased spending on personnel to support the continued execution of our strategic initiatives. Now turning to Page 9. Let me first comment on the operating metrics trends in the second quarter.

Versus 2019, overall spending has remained resilient. When viewed year-over-year on a sequential basis, we are seeing some moderation in both inflation and spend in select international markets as well as more difficult comps. As it relates to the first 3 weeks of July, our metrics are holding up well, generally in line with Q2 when indexed to 2019. Just for your information, we have included all the data points from this schedule excluding activity from Russian-issued cards from current and prior periods in the appendix. Turning to Page 10. I want to share our thoughts on the remainder of the year. Let me start by saying that our business fundamentals continue to remain strong as overall consumer spending remains healthy and we continue to deepen our relationships with partners across the globe.

Domestic spending patterns have broadly normalized postpandemic. Cross-border travel continues to grow at a healthy pace, now above 150% of 2019 levels. While the travel recovery has progressed well in most regions, there remain pockets of opportunity, notably into and out of China. We remain well positioned to capitalize on this continued growth with our travel-oriented portfolios and related service offerings. Cross-border card-not-present ex travel continues to hold up well. While we are monitoring a number of macro and geopolitical factors, our base case scenario for the year continues to assume consumer spending remains resilient, buoyed by strong labor market and reflects current spending dynamics and the ongoing recovery of cross-border travel.

For the year, our outlook is broadly unchanged. We expect net revenue growth for the full year 2023 to remain in the low teens range on a currency-neutral basis excluding acquisitions and special items. As a reminder, this growth rate would have been approximately 1.5 ppt higher if you exclude Russia-related revenues from 2022. Foreign exchange is expected to be a tailwind of 1 ppt for the year, and we expect a minimal impact from acquisitions. Our expectations for operating expense for the year are also unchanged with growth expected to be at the high end of a high single-digit rate on a currency-neutral basis excluding acquisitions and special items. Acquisitions are forecasted to add about 1 ppt to this growth, and foreign exchange is expected to be a headwind of approximately 0 to 1 ppt for the year.

As Michael mentioned, we are prepared to proactively adjust our operating expenses if we see meaningful changes to top line growth. With respect to the third quarter, year-over-year net revenue is expected to grow at a low double-digit rate, again, on a currency-neutral basis excluding acquisitions and special items. Coming off a strong Q2, this sequentially reflects a lower anticipated contribution to growth from revenues related to FX volatility. Foreign exchange is expected to be a tailwind of approximately 3 ppt, and acquisitions are not expected to have much of an impact for the quarter. From an operating expense standpoint, we expect Q3 growth to be at the high end of a high single-digit rate versus a year ago on a currency-neutral basis excluding acquisitions and special items.

Acquisitions are forecast to add approximately 0 to 1 ppt to this growth, and foreign exchange is expected to be a headwind of approximately 1 to 2 ppt. Other items to keep in mind. First, on the other income and expense line, we forecast an expense of approximately $90 million for Q3. This excludes gains and losses on our equity investments, which are excluded from our non-GAAP metrics. Second, we expect a non-GAAP tax rate of between 18% and 19% for Q3 and Q4 based on the current geographic mix of our business and the recent U.S. tax guidance that allows for more tax credits to be claimed related to 2022 and 2023. And with that, I will turn the call back over to Devin.

Devin Corr: Thank you, Sachin. Audra, we are now ready to begin the question-and-answer session.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. We’ll take our first question from Tien-Tsin Huang at JPMorgan.

Tien-Tsin Huang: Just want to ask on the UniCredit win there. That was a nice one just outside of the top 10, it looks like, in Europe. So you mentioned a multi-market strategies what they’re going after, and I heard sustainability also as a reason for the win. I’m just curious, thinking about this as a case study, is this a new trend? Why are they employing the strategy now in the wake of a lot of the macro uncertainty, open banking, and there was a lot of talk about pan-European schemes and whatnot. So I’m — just wanted to study this a little bit and if there’s any comments on timing pricing as well.

Michael Miebach: Right. Tien-Tsin, thanks for the question. So this is a fantastic win. We’re excited about that. As I laid out, it’s very unique. This is a pan-European bank, so cutting across 13 banks in 12 markets. It’s a wide strategy. Therefore, it’s single card, multi-market and it cuts across a lot of our digital capabilities. So I think the breadth of our offering on the digital-first side as well as our services are a key aspect of us winning this particular portfolio. The sustainability part, we see this across a whole range of customers who are all looking at climate as the question of the century to solve, what can be done, the consumption question in the context of payments. There’s so many angles to it. Our Priceless Planet Coalition on tree planting itself plays into that.

So that is particularly important to UniCredit. So here again, we had a meeting of the minds. In the end, it comes down to as part of the migration, and you alluded to this in your question, do we stand ready to serve their needs from day 1 as the migration starts. We have proven this with Deutsche Bank, we’ve proven it with NatWest and so forth. So this is something that is not new to us. So we’re excited to see this unfold over the near future.

Operator: We’ll go next to Harshita Rawat at Bernstein.

Harshita Rawat: Michael, I want to ask about FedNow, which is now finally launched. I know you’ve commented on this before, and it’s very early days and far from any sort of ubiquity or potential retail payment use cases. But you’ve had also a lot of experience working alongside real-time payments rails owning some TAM. So how are you thinking about FedNow and the risk [indiscernible] involved.

Michael Miebach: Thanks, Harshita. Yes, we’re all monitoring what FedNow is doing. They are now going live. So this is clearly a milestone, a good opportunity to look at this topic again. Yes, our view on this really hasn’t changed. So in the end, it comes down to what problem you are trying to solve. What are merchants looking for? Merchants are looking for reach to consumers. So scale matters. What are consumers looking for? Consumers are looking for safe ways to pay in a predictable fashion, ubiquity available. So those are all factors that haven’t changed with this launch. We built that acceptance. We have a brand, the 2 interlocking circles that represent trust so that addresses a lot of what merchants and consumers are looking for.

And we strengthened the position — the proposition over years, contactless, Tap on Phone, buy now, pay later, Mastercard Installments, Click to Pay and so forth. So that’s good. The Mastercard debit proposition is strong, and we keep evolving that. So it’s well understood now. FedNow is launching. So as we look at that, we will obviously continue to compete and offer our services to our banking and issuing partners. At the same time, in our experience, to your question, we have stayed close to these systems in various other countries in the end, ending up partnering with most of them. So here, we’ll have to see where it goes live. Going live doesn’t mean that it is broadly available yet. It is early days, as you said. It doesn’t have features.