MasterCard Worldwide (NYSE:MA) is a multinational corporation. 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 card to make purchases. Prior to its initial public offerings, MasterCard Worldwide was a membership organization owned by the 25,000+ financial institutions that issue its card.

MasterCard, originally known as MasterCharge, was created by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Banks of America, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc.

MasterCard operates Banknet, a global telecommunication network linking all MasterCard card issuers, acquirers and data processing centers into a single financial network.

MasterCard’s network is significantly different from Visa’s. Visa’s is a star based system where all endpoints terminate at one of several main data centers, where all transactions are processed centrally. MasterCard’s network is an edge based, peer-to-peer network where transactions travel a meshed network directly to other endpoints, without the need to travel to a single point. This allows MasterCard’s network to be much more resilient, in that a single failure cannot isolate a large number of endpoints.

Website: www.mastercard.com