Mastercard is working to branch into health care, fintech and supply chain management. It’s a unified part of trying to “broaden the scope of what we do, and who we do it with,” Craig Vosburg, the company’s president of North America, told Fortune. The new strategy is anchored around “the notion of Mastercard being [about] more than just cards.
As part of its quest to push its business beyond the realm of electronic payments, Mastercard has unveiled a series of initiatives targeting an array of industries and services—including new platforms geared toward the healthcare and fintech sectors, and a blockchain-enabled partnership designed to increase the transparency of companies’ supply chains.
The initiatives are part of a concentrated effort by the payment services giant to “broaden the scope of what we do, and who we do it with,” Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s president of North America, told Fortune.
That strategy is focused around “the notion of Mastercard being [about] more than just cards”—with Vosburg citing the company’s recent acquisition of European payment services firm Nets among investments aimed at “expanding the means by which we’re capable of moving money.”
But if you look deeper, Mastercard is simply working to have a double play. It needs to generate transaction volumes. Those healthcare and supply chain management businesses would deliver them. Then, upon those volumes, it will capture its commissions on using its cards. This is the same model OPay is using in Nigeria with its clusters of bus, keke, biking, etc units.
I explained in the duality element that digital products which thrive are typically both products and platforms. It would be hopeless to build modern digital products without having a moat through platforms. Interestingly, the greatest digital ICT utilities have double plays in their business models: if Amazon decimates many brick-and-mortar stores, it would welcome many online to sell them cloud services. Alibaba welcomes you to its marketplace platforms, and you certainly have signed up for its (partly affiliated) payment processing solutions (Alipay) which command commissions.
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With technology, you can bring convergence on products and services that traditionally would appear to be mutually exclusive, but with ever-evolving and unlimited business models to play with, nothing is off the table.
As it stands now, you do not need deep knowledge in any sector to do well there, just take a shot; your customers will help you along the way…
The era of core competency is over – you can enter into any domain because tech has reduced the cost of doing so