MasterCard 2008 Annual Report Download - page 13

Forward-Looking Statements
This Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the
Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this Report, the words “believe,” “expect,”
“could,” “may,” “would”, “will” and similar words are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These
forward-looking statements relate to the Company’s future prospects, developments and business strategies and
include, without limitation, the Company’s belief in its ability to drive growth by further penetrating its existing
customer base and by expanding its role in targeted geographies and higher-growth segments of the global
payments industry, enhancing its relationships with merchants, expanding points of acceptance for its brands,
seeking to maintain unsurpassed acceptance and continuing to invest in its brands, pursuing incremental payment
opportunities throughout the world, increasing its volume of business with customers over time, continuing to
develop opportunities to further enhance MasterCard Integrated Processing Solutions™(“IPS”) offerings,
continuing to explore opportunities to further enhance its debit transaction processing and maintaining a strong
business presence in Europe as well as effectively positioning the business as the Single European Payment Area
(“SEPA”) initiative creates a more integrated payment market in Europe. Many factors and uncertainties relating
to our operations and business environment, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of
our control, influence whether any forward-looking statements can or will be achieved. Any one of those factors
could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in writing in any forward-
looking statements made by MasterCard or on its behalf. We believe there are certain risk factors that are
important to our business, and these could cause actual results to differ from our expectations. Please see a
complete discussion of these risk factors in Item 1A—Risk Factors of this report.
In this Report, references to the “Company,” “MasterCard,” “we,” “us” or “our” refer to the MasterCard
brand generally, and to the business conducted by MasterCard Incorporated and its consolidated subsidiaries,
including our principal operating subsidiary, MasterCard International Incorporated (d/b/a MasterCard
Worldwide).
Item 1. Business
Overview
MasterCard is a leading global payment solutions company that provides a variety of services in support of
the credit, debit and related payment programs of over 24,000 financial institutions and other entities that are our
customers. Through our three-tiered business model as franchisor, processor and advisor, we develop and market
payment solutions, process payment transactions, and provide support services to our customers and, depending
upon the service, to merchants and other clients. We manage a family of well-known, widely accepted payment
card brands, including MasterCard®, MasterCard Electronic™, Maestro®and Cirrus®, which we license to our
customers. As part of managing these brands, we also establish and enforce rules and standards surrounding the
use of our payment card network. We generate revenues from the fees that we charge our customers for
providing transaction processing and other payment-related services (operations fees) and by assessing our
customers based primarily on the dollar volume of activity on the cards that carry our brands (assessments).
A typical transaction processed over our network involves four parties in addition to us: the cardholder, the
merchant, the issuer (the cardholder’s bank) and the acquirer (the merchant’s bank). Consequently, the payment
network we operate is often referred to as a “four-party” payment system. Our customers are the financial
institutions and other entities that act as issuers and acquirers. Using our transaction processing services, issuers
and acquirers facilitate payment transactions between cardholders and merchants throughout the world, providing
merchants with an efficient and secure means of receiving payment, and consumers and businesses with a
convenient, quick and secure payment method that is accepted worldwide. We guarantee the settlement of many
of these transactions among our customer financial institutions to ensure the integrity of our payment network. In
addition, we undertake a variety of marketing activities designed to maintain and enhance the value of our
brands. However, cardholder and merchant transaction relationships are managed principally by our customers.
Accordingly, we do not issue cards, extend credit to cardholders, determine the interest rates (if applicable) or
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