Mastercard expands value-added services push amid UPI dominance

The payments major is expanding into cybersecurity, analytics, AI and loyalty services as it seeks new growth avenues beyond its traditional payments network business

Mastercard is expanding its value-added services business in India beyond its existing traditional offering of payment network, as digital payment methods such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI) continues to dominate the payments landscape.  These services include a focus on cybersecurity, analytics, consulting, artificial intelligence (AI), and loyalty, as well as other services, including a focus on expanding low-cost payment acceptance devices such as soundboxes. 

“Our focus on services for the last many years was not as deep as it was in other markets. So, we are changing that,” Gautam Aggarwal, Division President, South Asia, Mastercard, told Business Standard.  Globally, the company has nearly 41 per cent of its revenue from its non-core business, he said. 

In India, it would follow a three-pronged strategy – consumer payments, commercial payments and services. 

“If I am going to be a payments network in India, which is what UPI, RuPay, Mastercard, Visa, Amex, all of us do as another money moving system. Then I will not be able to compete because I will have to be the lowest cost player. (Instead), I have to create a value-add,” Aggarwal said.  His comments come at a time when UPI has more than 85 per cent share of retail digital payments market. However, merchant discount rate (MDR) continues to be nil. 

When asked if a potential Mastercard-UPI linkage was being explored to expand payments acceptance, Aggarwal did not comment, but said that the company would like to participate within the ecosystem. 

He said that dominance of UPI and growing traction for RuPay has not taken away Mastercard’s market share, but instead has expanded the overall market.  “It is a policy matter. It is as much RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India), as the Government of India. We would like to participate in that ecosystem as much as we can. But, it is something that we will let the policy makers decide what is right for the ecosystem,” Aggarwal said. 

Currently, users can link their RuPay credit cards to UPI and make payments at both online and offline merchant outlets that accept UPI-based credit card transactions 

Furthermore, he said the company has been able to grow its India business close to its global growth, at around 20-25 per cent for the last many years. 

“We’ve been growing 20-25 per cent year on year (Y-o-Y) for the last many years. In India, specifically a year and a half, we had a bit of an embargo-related issues. If you take those two years out, we have been growing Y-o-Y in that very healthy range. We don’t want to compare it to UPI because there’s a base they serve that is very big. We will not get to those numbers,” he stated. 

Even as the non-payments business becomes important for Mastercard, he said that there was a huge scope to grow the credit card payments business in India.  Mastercard is also seeing a huge opportunity in the card segment in India, where a country of nearly 1.5 billion people has only 50 million people with credit cards and has high cash usage. 

The volume of credit card transactions in April 2026 rose 19.2 per cent Y-o-Y to 556.20 million, while the total value of transactions was up nearly 6.6 per cent Y-o-Y to ₹1.97 trillion.