MasterCard Payout

MasterCard Worldwide (NYSE: MA) is a multinational corporation based in Purchase, New York, US. Throughout the world, its principal business is to process payments between the banks of merchants and the banks of purchasers that use its "MasterCard" brand debit and credit cards to make purchases.

MasterCard Worldwide has been a publicly traded company since 2006. Prior to its initial public offering, MasterCard Worldwide was a membership organization owned by the 25,000+ financial institutions that issue its card.

It was originally created by Raymond Tanenhaus and Stanley Benovitz, two entrepreneurs in Louisville, Ky, and later sold in 1966 to United California Bank.

In 1966 a number of banks formed the Interbank Card Association (ICA). The name Master Charge was licensed by the above mentioned California banks from the First National Bank of Louisville, Kentucky in 1967. With the help of New York's Marine Midland Bank, now HSBC Bank USA, these banks joined with the ICA to create "Master Charge: The Interbank Card".

The card was given a significant boost in 1969, when National City Bank joined, merging its proprietary Everything Card with Master Charge.

In 1979, "Master Charge: The Interbank Card" was renamed simply "MasterCard". In the early 1990s MasterCard bought the British Access card and the Access name was dropped. In 2002, MasterCard International merged with Europay International SA, another large credit-card issuer association, which for many years issued cards under the name Eurocard.

In 2006, MasterCard International underwent another name change to MasterCard Worldwide. This was done in order to suggest a more global scale of operations. In addition, the company introduced a new corporate logo adding a third circle to the two that had been used in the past (the familiar card logo, resembling a Venn diagram, remains unchanged). A new corporate tagline was introduced at the same time: "The Heart of Commerce".

From the 1970s to the early 1990s MasterCard was known as "Carnet" (Card Network), but keeping the original MasterCard logo.