All right, we are ready to kick off our next session, which is with Craig Vosburg from Mastercard. He's the Chief Services Officer, which has become a bigger and bigger job these days as that business has continued to grow. Craig, thank you for being here. We appreciate it.
My pleasure.
You have had a long run at Mastercard, as we were just touching on a bit. Just for the audience's benefit, talk to us about how your role at the company has evolved over the last, I guess, two decades, right?
Yeah, coming up on it. 19 years I've been with the company. I actually started in what was a predecessor of the services business that I now have the privilege to lead in what was Mastercard Advisors, the consulting part of our business way back in 2006 in Singapore, which is where I joined the company. I have worked in a number of roles in the years since, running our market development group in the U.S., working with merchant acquirers, managing pricing and interchange, our core products group. I led our business in North America for a number of years. Prior to this role, I ran our Product & Engineering team, which handled all of our different payments products across the company.
I now look after a newly formed services organization that we created last year as part of a restructuring to align our key business units with the drivers of growth for our business. I took what were some important parts of our services portfolio that were spread in different parts of the organization, brought them together as one to make sure that we had a cohesive strategy and that we could fully realize the synergies that exist in that part of our business.
Yeah, great. I mean, services is now an $11 billion business for Mastercard. It's 40% of your revenue. Take us a level deeper. We talked about this a bit at the Investor Day, but I think it'll be good for everybody to just remind on kind of what the subsegments are, how you guys kind of deconstruct the Services business, and why you've decided to kind of go into these specific areas.
Yeah, I would be happy to. Services is something that's been an important part of our business for many years. It's evolved quite a bit over the course of that time. As I mentioned, as far back as 19 years ago when I joined, we were already in aspects of what is now services with our consulting business. It's evolved quite a bit over the years. As one, it's become a more important part of what differentiates Mastercard in the payment space. Two, as it's become a more important driver of revenue growth and revenue diversification for us as a business. Today, our services business, we report on Value-Added Services & Solutions. That includes the Services portfolio that's anchored around some key product groups that we brought together as part of the restructuring I mentioned that we did last year.
They anchor on a couple of areas that are just foundational to our business and that we see as real areas for growth going forward. Security solutions being one. Obviously, payments do not work without trust, and trust is predicated on security. We have invested for many years in solutions that help to reduce fraud. We have expanded over time to have that include things that enable us and our partners to more effectively manage identity, a broad base of identity management tools, and expand into the realm of cybersecurity, all related areas in the realm of trust, security, payments integrity, systemic integrity, and cybersecurity. That is one important product area. There is a second called consumer acquisition and engagement.
This is really all about working with our partners to help acquire new customers, maximize the value of every existing customer, deepen loyalty and engagement, and drive retention of those customers. In that part of the business, we provide a range of marketing services where we're working with partners to design and execute campaigns to acquire or engage customers. We're providing loyalty solutions, everything from rewards programs that we manage. We manage points programs on behalf of a huge number of issuers around the world. Offers programs to stimulate spending and engagement, personalization capabilities to make sure each of those things is targeting individuals in the right way with the relevant messages at the right time.
A third area that's business and market insights that really focuses on operational insights, portfolio analytics, custom analytics, where we're doing kind of bespoke analytical work with our partners, risk management, things related to credit risk, where we help provide data attributes to inform credit risk management and underwriting decisions. Our consulting products, and much of which revolve around payments, are in that part of the business as well. These are all things that we've organized around buyer groups, buyer personas with kind of consistent sets of needs. Those are really the anchor of the Value-Added Services part of our Value-Added Services & Solutions. The solutions piece is important as well.
Things that do not demonstrate the rate of growth of Value-Added Services, these are things like our real-time payments business, our bill payments activities, but that are important strategically as part of our payments proposition to offer maximum choice to consumers in how they pay and businesses in how they get paid, and provide opportunities for us to target them to deliver services as well.
Huge adjustable markets we're talking about here. I think I put some of the numbers out at the Investor Day. How should we be looking at penetration rates at this point? We'd like to understand kind of among those buckets you walk through, where are you most penetrated, where are you least penetrated, and we can go from there.
Yeah, they are big markets. I guess the starting point, which you've alluded to already, services for us, it's an $11 billion revenue line. It's 38% of the company's total revenue and is growing at last year grew at 17%. A significantly higher rate of growth than the core payments business. That being said, it's still an area that we see as having significant runway for growth, as demonstrated in some of the numbers that we shared at Investor Day. We see just the three categories that I've mentioned. By the way, there's others within our Services business: processing, our payments gateway, authentication, digital and authentication capabilities.
The three areas that I described in a little bit of detail just a moment ago in the aggregate represent a roughly $500 billion total addressable market, of which we see about $165 billion of that being serviceable by us today with products and services that we have in market today. If you map the $11 billion against those numbers, you see that the penetration rates are still quite low, 2% of the total addressable market, less than 7% of the serviceable addressable market. These are areas that we see as having real runway for growth for a very long time. We are targeting that in a number of ways. We will probably get into that a little bit more in terms of how we are going to market and the ways in which we are seeking to penetrate that.
This is part of at the core of why services is so important to us. First and foremost, directly linked to our business, absolutely feeds off of and reinforces the flywheel of having differentiated payments that help us grow share in our payments business, gives us more data from which we can create more value-added services, further differentiate, win market share, and the cycle continues. These are also real opportunities for revenue diversification that complement the payments revenue and enable us to tap into non-payments-based revenue pools.
Yeah, there's definitely a symbiotic relationship there between core and services. I do want to get more into that. Before we get there, I wanted to unpack numbers a little bit because I thought one of the particularly helpful disclosures at the Investor Day was you guys talking about forecasted growth for VASS, VASS with two S's, right? I think you talked about a high teens CAGR through 2027. Very consistent with what you just saw last year. I think that was the first time you guys kind of disaggregated the services forecast from the overall revenue forecast of the company. If we go back to maybe those three main buckets that you started with, what's the growth algorithm or the build-up, I should say, to kind of get to that high teens?
Are there some of these that are growing faster than high teens and some slower? Or maybe just help us put the pieces together and how that underscores your confidence in kind of maintaining that elevated growth rate?
Yeah, each of those three areas are large and fast-growing portions of the portfolio in their own right. They're all in excess of a billion dollars in revenue today. They're all growing at double-digit rates that are significantly greater than the rate of growth in the core. We feel good about the prospects for that growth to continue. That's predicated on a number of things. One is a significant portion of the services that we provide are linked in one way or another to the network and the payments activity that's happening in the network. We see real opportunity for ongoing growth in that part of the business. The secular migration or the secular shift to electronic payments remains very healthy and with substantial opportunity for growth. That provides a natural tailwind for those portions of our services business that are linked to the network.
Beyond that, that algorithm focuses on each of these different product areas that I described and the markets that they represent are growing in their own right. I mean, if you look at cybersecurity as an example, as the world continues to digitize, as companies and countries, governments are a big buyer of that kind of service too. As companies, countries, any entity has an expanding digital footprint. Obviously, they have greater exposure to cybersecurity threats, and there's greater demand for those kinds of services as the portion of commerce and business and economic activity that's digitized grows. That is true if you look in the characteristics of each of those product groups. They're growing in and of their own right.
We have taken a very targeted and intentional approach to expanding our capabilities in each one of those areas so that we can consciously migrate what's the addressable market into the serviceable market. We've done that through organic product development to expand our capabilities. We've done that through acquisitions to bring new capabilities into our franchise. We take very targeted, intentional approaches to selling into that market through a variety of go-to-market methods, but to deepen our penetration, which, as I alluded to, we have a long way to go in terms of really maximizing the opportunity that it represents.
Let's come back to the network-linked concept. I think 60% of the VASS business, I think, is network-linked. Just for the benefit of everybody, just explain how you delineate that 60% from the other 40%, which we'll call it non-network-linked, and maybe go through some examples of both.
Sure. Network-linked are things that services that we can offer by virtue of the fact that we own and operate a payments network. That takes on a couple of forms. Some of those services are introduced directly in the course of processing a transaction. An easy example of this would be a lot of our fraud solutions where we are introducing fraud-scoring insights and algorithms as part of the authorization stream as a transaction is being processed. This is being injected, literally, hundreds of decisioning attributes that are evaluated and injected into the authorization stream in less than 100 ms as the transaction is crossing through our system to enable issuers and acquirers to make better decisions about which transactions to approve and accept.
That is a transaction-linked service that is directly connected to an actual transaction, but there are others that are correlated to transactions but may not occur with every transaction. As an example, dispute resolution, chargebacks, things along those lines, stand-in services where we step in on behalf of an issuer if their systems go down to make decisions on their behalf in accordance with their decisioning parameters. These are things that correlate to transaction volume. We can do it because we operate the network, but they're not specifically transaction-linked.
There is a third category of things that just run off of data and insights that we get from the card network that we would not have if we did not operate a card network, portfolio insights, operational insights, things that are valuable to people running payments programs where they can benefit and improve their decision-making by virtue of having access to those kinds of transaction-based data sets and insights. The 40% that is not transaction, that is not network-linked consists of a couple of things. There is a lot of work we do in services we call engagement-based services if we are executing a marketing campaign on behalf of a partner to acquire new customers, if we are doing consulting work with them on any kind of issue, anything ranging from payment strategy to segment strategy to a risk or fraud strategy.
All of that benefits from the fact that we have a network because we have more insights around payments and we have data, but it's not actually linked to the network. There's a range of things that we sell now increasingly that have really very little connection to the network. Something like the threat intelligence capability we just acquired with Recorded Future, great capability, great demand for cybersecurity solutions, but it's not dependent on the network. It complements some things that we do related to the network, but the revenue growth there is not dependent on the network.
Right, right, right. Okay. You're going to have a lot of sort of traditional time and materials, headcount-based pricing and network-linked.
Some of that, that's the engagement-based part a little bit more in that model. There are other parts that are transaction-based. There might be a fixed fee per click, API calls.
Right, almost like a SaaS-ish.
Yeah, a number of SaaS platforms in the services portfolio. There is a range of different pricing models and cost models that accompany them as well.
Right. One big question that we get a lot, so I'm going to ask you the question, is, how should we think about Mastercard's overall portfolio of value-added services being differentiated from your largest competitor?
I frame differentiation not just in the context of differentiation from other payments networks, but from other providers in the space because a number of these areas, they're sort of point solution providers aside from security firms.
Exactly. Yeah, let's go through all that.
In my mind, there are five things that differentiate us, and they are applicable in different combinations across any of those different competitor sets. It starts with the data, the breadth of data we have, the depth of that data, the quality of the data, our technology, which enables us to make use of that data, the breadth of our products and services that create synergies between those services with each other, fraud solutions working together, for example, or a fraud solution working with a customer acquisition campaign to increase the integrity of acquired accounts or ensure the integrity. The value of our relationships with banks, acquirers, fintechs, merchants around the world, and the expertise of our people.
If you look at those five things, whether we're talking about another payment network or whether we're talking about a single point provider, that is really at the foundation of our differentiation. Our data, it started historically with our card transaction data. We've invested in that for well over a decade to cleanse that data, to categorize the data, to warehouse the data, to model the data, use it to train analytical models and algorithms, use it to be able to identify literally thousands of attributes that are associated with every account that runs on our network that give us insights around the behaviors of those accounts.
We've also, over time, systematically broadened that pool of data to include not just card transaction data, but identity data, device data, biometric data, real-time payments data, open banking data, payments gateway data, commercial card transaction data, buyer-supplier relationships, and all of these things number in the billions, right? This is data at scale. We've broadened that data set and can use that. It comes subject to some different usage considerations. There's geographic considerations. There's on soil considerations. Obviously, we adhere very closely to privacy and our data usage policies, but the power of combining these things becomes very differentiating and very powerful, being able to introduce it in real time in our transaction stream or leverage it across SaaS platforms that we have in place in a number of these product areas with a broad range of customers.
We've talked a little bit about the synergies between some of these products. If you're a point solution provider, you don't have a payments portfolio to link them to, where combining them with a payments proposition delivers a real irrefutable economic benefit because of the economics of the payments business combined with the value that services provide, increasing the value of that part of the franchise and optimizing its performance. Relationships, tens of thousands of banks around the world and our people. I do want to underscore the importance of our expertise.
More than 3,000 consultants who are Mastercard employees who are part of our services business, positioned all around the globe, working with our partners in literally every market in which we operate, deep subject matter experts in fraud, in risk, in marketing, a huge team of data scientists that are turning this data into value-added insights and products. That is how we think about the differentiation of it. You look at competitors, whether it is a network or a point solution provider, they may touch some of those five things, but we do not think anybody touches them all.
What are some examples of kind of those point solution providers, maybe in some different areas that we might be less familiar with?
You would have them in areas like consulting, and those you'll be well familiar with, whether it's a strategy firm or a specialist consultant. We see it in the realm of marketing agencies, third parties that are conducting marketing activities. We see it in the loyalty space. There are loyalty-specific solution providers. We certainly see it in cyber and the cybersecurity space where there's obviously been a lot of investment for good reason because it's a growth area. Each of those areas, and there are others that I haven't named, each of those has their pure-play players in that space. They do good work, but they don't have that breadth of capability that we have.
Yeah, they can't check those five boxes, right? I think you alluded to it a little bit, but I want to go deeper into go-to-market strategy. Maybe tell us a little bit about how that's evolved. I mean, as services has become a bigger priority at Mastercard.
Sure. We go to market in a variety of ways. One, which I've already described a little bit, is through the network. Where we can, we're enriching the value of the network with services and using the network as a way to distribute some of those at scale to our partners and linking them to transactions around the world. That has been and will continue to be an important go-to-market pathway for us. There are other technology-driven paths that exist within our own franchise. We have real-time payment rails. We have a payments gateway. We have Mastercard Move for disbursements and remittances.
Each of these represent technology platforms that we own and operate, or in some cases, license that can be used as channels through which to distribute services appended to different kinds of transactions that are not necessarily cards transactions, but that benefit from the value of those services. We distribute services through some of our core products. A credit card, a prepaid card, a debit card, connecting services as part of the value proposition and identity theft kind of proposition, a benefit, lounge access, concierge services. We have a dedicated services sales force that works alongside our account teams that manage our relationships with banks and acquirers and fintechs around the globe.
Obviously, our account teams are very attuned to the value of our services because they're helping not just drive this revenue, but helping us differentiate and win market share in the core payments business, which our account teams are highly motivated and highly successful in doing. Because some of these services have a little bit of technical complexity, we complement that with a dedicated sales force that can go very deep in areas of subject matter expertise and can go deep on the technology associated with delivering them. For a number of our services, we expose the APIs to the developer community and leverage that as a channel for distribution as well. It is a fairly broad range of channels, I'd say, that we're leveraging to get our services out into the market.
What's the size of that dedicated sales force? Has that been growing?
It's grown in part because we've continued to invest in it as we grow the business. In part because typically when we acquire a company, they've got a sales force too. Recorded Future, a great example. They've got a great sales force of really deep, knowledgeable people who are engaged with corporates and governments all around the world on cybersecurity. We have hundreds of people who are dedicated to supporting the services business, either as kind of generalist services sales leads working with our account teams or as sales specialists focused on a particular capability.
Okay. All right. I know you mentioned Recorded Future, so I wanted to go there because it's pretty recent. I mean, I know you did Minna Technologies also. Both of these are going to augment the VASS business, but Recorded Future is bigger. Tell us why that was an important acquisition for Mastercard and what it's bringing to you on the security side that maybe you didn't have before.
Yeah. Recorded Future is important to us for a number of reasons. One, it's a very clear-cut example of this intentional approach we've taken to migrating addressable market into serviceable market. We've had a presence in aspects of cybersecurity for some time with other smaller acquisitions we've done over the years. We have seen through our engagements with our customers, conversations with risk teams, with tech teams, with CISOs that there's demand, right? There's appetite. We see it ourselves as a corporate that has also a very well-established CISO program to provide Mastercard. We talk to our partners all the time about that. We saw that as an important area of demand and an opportunity to have a natural extension from areas we were in.
All of these things that we're targeting to migrate addressable market to serviceable market were focused on the demand as well as what we view as our right to win based on it being a relatively close-in adjacency to things that we're already doing. This certainly fit the bill. Recorded Future is the company we viewed as the leader in the threat intelligence space, the leading independent company in that space. There were immediate synergies associated with that that link directly to our core business. As an example, part of what Recorded Future has visibility into are payments credentials that have been stolen and they're being sold on the dark web.
Oh, interesting.
That's an immediate synergy with our fraud capabilities with enriching the value of our payments propositions by taking advantage of visibility of the dark web marketplace and using that to identify stolen credentials and prevent their use for fraudulent purposes sooner and with greater frequency than we otherwise would. We also have the benefit of seeing the activity that's taking place on the dark web where these credentials get stolen. People buy them as part of the transaction involved in purchasing. Oftentimes, they'll pay a premium to have the credentials get tested before they complete the transaction to make sure they're still working. That gives us insight into merchant locations that are being used to test stolen credentials. That gives us the ability to work with acquirers to take action to prevent those kinds of fraudulent merchants accessing the network and using it to do bad things.
That's all very directly related to our core payments business. Recorded Future has this whole array of threat intelligence capabilities that go beyond that and aren't linked to payments, to understanding who are the threat actors in the cyber sphere and what are the tactics that they're deploying and where are their vulnerabilities that companies or governments have in managing their digital footprints and their environment. What actions can they take to protect themselves and defend themselves against those threat actors and the kinds of actions they're taking? We can share with partners where their brands are being abused for fraudulent purposes. Brand intelligence, where if a brand has been co-opted into a scam to establish a false sense of trust with someone to rip them off, brands don't like that, understandably so.
All these kinds of things, these are complementary capabilities we've now brought in-house with Recorded Future. I'll underscore a slightly different point that I've alluded to, but it's also important. The customer base that Recorded Future brings in, a sizable customer, 1,900 customers, corporates of all kinds, but importantly, governments. Working with 45 governments around the world, governments are obviously a very important stakeholder in payments. Being able to work closely with governments on things that are also important to them, such as managing their own cybersecurity, creates another opportunity for us to demonstrate the value that Mastercard brings by operating within their environment.
Does a customer subscribe to Recorded Future? Is that kind of the model?
Yep. They subscribe to it. It's a SaaS-based model. There are different modules that customers can subscribe to. There's sort of a threat intelligence graph, or they have a very innovative way of displaying the threat intelligence insights that they get for their customers so that the CISOs and others in corporates and governments that are charged with protecting their organizations can make sense of it relatively easily.
Right. Some kind of dashboard or something.
Importantly, do something about it.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah, it's a really great program.
Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like it. Sounds like it. I wanted to hit on AI because I know you guys talked about it a bit at the Investor Day. Tell us, I mean, I guess maybe we can go sort of top down at the Mastercard level, how is AI being deployed, and then maybe drill into how it's integrated into the services business. Let's start there.
Sure. AI has been part of the way Mastercard does business for well over a decade.
Yeah. It goes back to all the data you've got, right?
Back to the data. You can't make sense of that much data, particularly if you want to use it in real time without the benefit of some form of AI. We've been active with machine learning, with predictive AI, and now increasingly with generative AI and beginning to experiment with agentic AI as the technological underpinnings of AI have advanced. This has been part of how we do business for many years. It's had its roots in fraud detection, the fraud space, where we're really making use of as many different data attributes as possible. Going back to the earliest days of the network when the signals available to detect were derived from the attributes of the payment transaction itself, the merchant, the location, the amount, the merchant category.
Over time, as we've been able to complement that with device data, behavioral data, identity data, etc., that richer set of data provides more valuable signals around the authenticity of a transaction. AI is foundational to being able to do that. I maybe started with the second part of your question.
That's okay.
Where we're using it in some of our services. Broadly speaking, our approach to embracing AI, it's anchored on augmenting our commercial propositions with three main objectives in mind: making transactions and commerce safer, which I've already alluded to with some of the examples around fraud. You think about cyber and the example with the stolen credentials with Recorded Future. This is an interesting actual example of where generative AI can help advance the game, right? Recorded Future, we see what credentials are stolen and for sale on the dark web. You get a partial account number, last four digits, last six digits. You don't get the whole account number, typically.
Using generative AI, we can use that to predict what the remainder of the account number actually is and use that then to identify a specific card or account to either block if it's a high probability match or introduce a lot of friction into the transaction stream to ensure that there's step-ups in the authentication levels associated with transactions. That's a generative AI application to sort of fill in the blanks on the rest of the account number. Making transactions safer, we want to make our transactions and our portfolios smarter. Providing insights to our customers around, for example, a retry strategy. A merchant or acquirer runs a transaction. It gets declined. There are different strategies that will be deployed in terms of when and how to retry that transaction to see if they can get it approved.
AI can help in informing that strategy, making it more higher likelihood of it being successful. We're using it to make our commerce much more personal. In loyalty, in marketing, in the offers space, in retail applications when we're working with merchants, for example, to help design their websites and personalize them so that your experience at Merchant X and what you see is different from what I see based on our individual behaviors. AI is playing an important role in that. Those are all commercial applications. Of course, like everyone, we're also using it to make our own business more efficient, helping our software engineers code more productively, helping our customer delivery teams onboard new products and new customers more quickly, things to just drive efficiency in our own business.
Right. Right. Right. If we just think about maybe the next level, agentic commerce, personalized commerce experiences, right? Am I going to have an agent guiding my shopping around the web? Is that something that we can see in the next couple of years or so?
I'm not going to handicap the timeframe, but someday, yeah, you're going to say, "I want to go to Rio on vacation." And you're going to get a whole, "All right, here's your itinerary.
Yeah. Here are the hotels you can pay for.
Hotels, here's your flights, here's some great restaurants we booked you at. Here's a day, a tour. That is going to come. That is the kind of future we are preparing the business for, both in terms of the payments capabilities so that we are not only present, but we are ensuring that that is a secure transaction, leveraging things like tokenization and the ability to provide a seamless payments experience, but one that is going to still need to be controlled, right? You do not want payments transactions happening on your credentials that you have no idea what is going on. A controlled, secure, still ubiquitous payments experience. In the example I described, you can envision the services we have the opportunity to wrap around that with loyalty, with offers, with fraud solutions, with cyber solutions, etc.
Commercial is another part of Mastercard that's definitely a growth priority. How can the services business help enable accelerated growth in commercial and any examples of that, or just talk about the strategy behind it?
Yeah. Very much a part of the services strategy starts with differentiating consumer payments and differentiating and helping us accelerate growth in commercial and new payments flows. The third piece, of course, being a driver of diversified revenue growth for us. The commercial and new payments flows and commercial in particular is still a relatively newer market. It's a market where lots of our partners have interest in exploring but haven't necessarily fully engaged in the opportunity. A lot of the work that we're doing with partners related to commercial, whether it's small business or large market, really is focused on helping them understand the opportunity, helping them dimension the business case, helping them put together an implementation plan to enter the business. In a number of cases, helping them build the capabilities they need to be able to run the business effectively.
Our consultants do not just do consulting work from afar. We are oftentimes embedded with the partners, working on site, working with them, with their data, with their teams, with their policies to help stand up these businesses, which for us is just a great partnering opportunity. It is a nice compounder because this is a really important part of our strategy too. We need partners who are interested in investing in the space. They are going to invest if they see a path to profitable growth. If we can help lay out that path, define it, and then even go as far as to help execute through our services team, that is a win all the way around.
As that business grows, there's the same opportunities to link services to transactions that I've described earlier, whether that's a card transaction that's running on the network or whether that's a non-transaction-based opportunity around some of these non-payments-based services I've mentioned.
Tell us a little bit about how you decide, I guess, with the rest of the executive team to just allocating investment dollars, right? You have all these opportunities and services that we've talked about, right? Most of them are growing materially faster than the core Mastercard business. How do you prioritize the investment decisions? Tell us about buy vs build, right? You've been active with acquisitions for a number of years in the services business, but you don't always buy, right? Sometimes you build.
Yeah. Yeah. It starts with the strategy and being clear on where do we see the opportunities to reinforce that flywheel of services, areas that will complement or strengthen or differentiate payments, whether it's consumer or commercial. Where do we see growing market opportunities that represent large growing markets? Where do we see the intersection of those with capabilities or differentiating assets that we think give us the right to win? That's what we've articulated now in terms of the portfolio. The focus really will be on the going forward focus will be on expanding the capabilities within those areas to enable us to deepen penetration within those very large and for us underpenetrated markets. That'll come through both build and buy. Personally, I probably have a preference to build.
We will absolutely continue to use buy if there are capabilities that we think we're less likely to be successful in building on our own to have a world-leading proposition or that will take too long to realize the opportunity. Again, I keep bringing up Recorded Future because it's the most recent, but that's a perfect example of that. That's not something we would have built to that quality in a timeframe that gave us the opportunity to really take advantage of that. A buy in that case was the natural decision.
Right. Time to market, obviously, becomes a determinant here. In the last minute that we've got, I mean, I guess if you just synthesize everything we've discussed, where do you stand in terms of what you're most excited about for the services business over the next several years?
I'm excited about a lot, fortunately.
Yeah. Like picking your favorite child.
Yeah. I think just when I think about the role that it plays in Mastercard's overall business strategy and the things that are going to continue to drive growth for our company and deliver value to our shareholders, it's just so deeply intertwined in how we're going to win in payments and continue to differentiate on both consumer and commercial and where there are opportunities to continue to drive revenue growth at rates that will elevate the average for the company overall. The size of those addressable markets, the assets and capabilities we have to work with, the areas that I mentioned as being our key differentiators, the energy of our team and the intellect and the competitive spirit of the team, it's aligned, I think, with megatrends around using data more effectively and leveraging new kinds of technologies, AI being one to derive more value from that data.
Our data is proprietary data. It's our data. We're the only ones who are going to be able to extract that value and deliver it to the market for the benefit of our partners. That all sets up to be an exciting couple of years ahead for us.
For sure. For sure. All right. With that, we're out of time. Craig, really appreciate all the insights.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Next session here and keep everybody on schedule. We are very excited to have Bob Hau from Fiserv here, Chief Financial Officer, who many of you know. Bob, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Got a lot of stuff we want to kind of hit on with you because there's always a lot of stuff going on at Fiserv and tends to be good stuff. So we like those conversations. I wanted to start kind of big picture on some of the data that you guys tend to put out monthly. You've got your small business index and you've got your SpendT rend report. And if we look at what you guys have shown since the beginning of the year, at least through February, pretty healthy numbers, I would say overall. I mean, seasonally adjusted, it seems like there's stability is kind of the trend. At the same time, there's been a lot of fresh debates in recent weeks about the macro and the tariff uncertainty and some airlines are cutting guidance, right? And all kinds of moving parts.
Just anything you can share in terms of what you guys are seeing more recently on the merchant side of the business, volumes, transaction growth?
Yeah. You pointed to the, I guess the one key one I would reference is the Fiserv Small Business Index, which is an index we've been publishing for a little more than a year now that tracks the health of the U.S. small businesses. This is a wide swath of data that we use. It's not a survey. It's actual data that we have available to us through our variety of merchant channels looking at debit card, credit card, cash spending, etc. We saw good growth in January, up about just under 5% year-over-year. January to February, month over month was essentially flat, but February over February last year was up about 2%. Slow on a year-over-year basis had slowed a bit, but still generally in line with our expectations.
Certainly a lot of news these days, but a lot of news, not necessarily a lot of movement. Some of the airlines you talked about were guiding to a lower outlook versus actually saying it's lower today sort of thing. And some of the retailers, a little bit of a mix. Right now, I think if you watch your local news channel or your favorite business news channel, lots and lots of conversations about tariffs on, tariffs off. At the end of the day right now, there's an increase in tariffs to China and I think an aluminum tariff in place. Other than that, everything has been kind of stayed, but that's causing some uncertainty in the market and the market doesn't like uncertainty. So far, I would say consumer continues to spend at maybe a slightly lower pace than certainly what we saw in January.
Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. Definitely a lot of noise. Sometimes we got to separate the noise from the facts. That's all helpful.
Yeah. The one thing I would point to is for our business in particular, given the breadth of reach that we have, obviously both in the U.S., but globally, we like to say we touch nearly 100% of all U.S. households. We have a broad reach, but also a broad distribution, meaning roughly half of our merchant acquiring business is discretionary spending. The other half is non-discretionary spending. There is some inherent balance within the company. We think over the last 40 years of our existence, we have shown a pretty good resilience and the ability to deliver in any economic environment.
Putting a [audio distortion].
That's right. Last year was our 39th consecutive year of double-digit EPS growth. That's a lot of really good cycles and a lot of pretty tough cycles.
For sure. For sure. Maybe just remind us about some of the other considerations for Q1. I mean, there's Leap Day, of course, everyone has to kind of grow over. There's some Argentina dynamics for Fiserv. Just if you want to put a finer point on any of that, just as people start to firm up their first quarter numbers.
Yeah. It's actually something we pointed out when we gave original guidance for the year back in early February during our fourth quarter earnings call. We gave a full year guide for top- line growth of 10%-12% organic growth, operating margins expanding at least 125 basis points, and earnings per share growing 15%-17%, but that we would expect to see that organic growth ramp through the course of the year. There's really a number of key factors that are playing there. First and foremost, as you pointed out, Argentina. In 2024, we saw transitory benefit of extraordinary inflation and interest rates in Argentina for the year at about 11%. That waned throughout the course of the year. It started out much higher. First quarter last year was a 22% benefit.
That eased so that when we closed out the year fourth quarter, I think it was about 6%. That's to the merchant organic growth line. That eased pretty considerably. By the time we closed out fourth quarter, both inflation and interest had returned to more normal levels such that we won't see the transitory benefit of that in 2025. Very tough comparison Q1 levels offer or eases through the balance of the year such that we finished the year at 11%, which is why you see the growth for the full year at that 10%-12% organic. Second thing is there's a number of new products, new contracts, new clients coming on board throughout the year. Things like CashFlow Central that will go live in second quarter and ramp through the year.
A number of large issuing contracts going live with Target and Verizon, the two largest ones that we talk pretty regularly about. Target actually went live earlier this week over the weekend.
Congratulations.
Verizon will go live very late third quarter, early fourth quarter. You have things like the ADP partnership continuing to ramp, rolling out Clover in three new geographies in Brazil, Australia, and Mexico. Brazil, we are live, formal official launch and now selling. Australia, we did that official launch party in early December and now selling that in 2025. The launch party in Australia is at the end of this month. Mexico will follow behind. That ramps over the course of the year. We feel quite good about the visibility into those programs. They are either launched or launching very quickly. We will see growth accelerate through the year.
Just one follow-up on the tariffs. I mean, anything indirect we need to think about? I mean, I don't know how much of your merchant business is in places like Canada or Mexico or anything in terms of point- of- sale devices. Do you source any of those from China or anything like that?
Yeah. I would say no direct impact for all practical purposes. Yes, we have business in Mexico. We have it in Canada and everywhere else around the globe. It is not a tariff import-export dynamic. It is what happens to the local economy.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
The indirect aspect, whether it's one of the many foreign countries that may or may not be impacted or may not be impacted, but also, of course, what happens to the U.S. At the end of the day, very modest inflation is good for our company because higher volumes mean higher revenue. But it's got to be modest. When you see extraordinary inflation, you see the secondary impact to the consumer.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I think we're all watching and hoping will happen.
Yeah. Exactly right. Correct.
Okay, great. So Michael.