For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. This factor can impact your investment portfolio as well as help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in MasterCard (MA) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to MA for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

MasterCard's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at MasterCard's main business drivers.

Founded in 1966 and headquartered in Purchase, NY, Mastercard Inc. is a leading global payment solutions company that provides an array of services in support of credit, debit, mobile, web-based and contactless payments, and other related electronic payment programs to financial institutions and other entities.

The company's payment solutions include payment programs, marketing, product development, technology, processing, consulting and information services. It also provides worldwide transaction processing and other payment-related services, which include facilitating the authorization, clearing and settlement process of transactions, as well as processing cross-border and currency conversion transactions.

In May 2001, the company was incorporated as a Delaware stock corporation. Mastercard has one reportable operating segment, Payment Solutions. Mastercard also reports its net revenues by geographical market. No individual country apart from the United States contributed more than 10% of net revenues in 2023. The company generated 33.3% of its revenues from the North American Markets whilst generating the remaining 66.7% from International Markets.

The company manages and licenses payment card brands including MasterCard, Maestro and Cirrus. The company generates revenues from the fees it charges its customers for transaction processing and other payment-related services. It also earns revenues by charging customers for assessments based on the gross dollar volume (GDV) of activity on the cards that carry MasterCard brands. Revenues of the company are based on factors such as cross-border volumes, number of transactions, GDV and pricing changes.

The company operates a unique and proprietary global payments network that links issuers and acquirers around the globe to facilitate the switching of transactions, permitting account holders to use a Mastercard product at millions of acceptance locations worldwide. Its core network facilitates an efficient and secure means for receiving payments, a convenient payment method for consumers to access their funds and a channel for businesses to receive insight that is derived from its network. Mastercard authorizes, clears, and settles transactions through its core network for issuer customers in more than 150 currencies and in more than 210 countries and territories.