Dive Brief:

• Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach outlined the card network’s international ambitions during an investor conference Monday, including the opportunity in Europe to shift consumers from cash to cards, particularly in Italy. In France and Germany, where there is less cash use, “there’s still a lot to go after,” he said.
• There are also opportunities in China, where Mastercard recently won new government approval to offer domestic card services, and in Japan, which is “not very digitized,” he said at JPMorgan Chase’s global technology, media and communications conference.
• Miebach noted how Mastercard’s telecom acquisitions in Africa are helping it pursue business on that continent. “If you go into Africa, where is the transaction happening — it's happening on a phone,” he explained at the conference. “So, mobile-based financial services — you have to really become very deliberate, very local in your approach to go after that.”

Dive Insight:

The Purchase, New York company is particularly focused on increasing business in China, the second most populous country in the world behind India. Mastercard formed a Beijing joint venture with a Chinese counterpart and began processing payments this month for cards issued by the country’s banks after winning approval from that country’s government to do so.

While Mastercard faces competition from China’s major, homegrown rival, UnionPay International, Miebach contends his company still has some advantage in that its services are more developed in other countries around the world. American Express also has approval to operate in China’s domestic market, but Mastercard’s larger rival Visa does not.

“The proposition that we can now offer, that nobody else can really offer, is a fully domestic-issued and usable card, and combined in one single card with the best acceptance globally,” Miebach argued, given Visa, doesn’t have permission to offer domestic services in the country. “UnionPay cannot offer that, Amex cannot offer that,” he said, noting “there's another large American payment company which does not have a license (in China) today.”

Mastercard is now working on acquiring and acceptance programs for the new card services in China, he said.

“It's also important to know, that from day one, every one of these single-use issued cards, those credentials can be used in the Chinese wallets,” Miebach said. “So you get a bit of a head-start on the acceptance side, but we will be very busy building out our own acceptance.”

Miebach started at the card network in 2010, with marching orders to build out the company’s presence in Africa. Since then, he described how Mastercard’s international operations have changed.

“Today, two-thirds of our revenue is from outside of the United States and Canada, so it really flipped around from a fairly North America-centric business to a very, very international footprint,” he said.

Mastercard drew $16.74 billion of its $25 billion in net revenue last year from outside North America, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.