Business & Payments
Visa/Mastercard
The two dominant global card payment networks used for ad spend and payouts.
Visa and Mastercard are the two dominant global card networks — the rails over which the overwhelming majority of card payments for ad spend, subscriptions, and offer deposits travel. They don't issue cards or hold funds themselves; they set the rules, route transactions between issuing and acquiring banks, and enforce chargeback, fraud, and merchant-category standards worldwide.
Buyers feel the networks' presence through their rulebooks more than their logos. Network risk programs decide which merchant categories (gambling among them) face extra scrutiny, chargeback thresholds, and regional restrictions — the reason a deposit works in one GEO and dies in another. When choosing card providers or evaluating an offer's cashier, checking which network the cards run on and how that network treats the vertical in that GEO is basic due diligence.
In buyer speech
“The cashier only takes Visa in that GEO, and our provider's cards are all Mastercard — deposits are dying at the last step.”