Mastercard Connects 1 Billion People to Digital Economy

Mastercard has connected 1 billion people and more than 65 million small businesses to the digital economy, hitting the inclusion target it expanded during Covid. The milestone, the company says, is not the finish line. Mastercard has now set a new goal: connect and protect 500 million people and small businesses on their journey toward financial health by 2030.

"Access isn't enough," said Shamina Singh, founder and president of Mastercard's Center for Inclusive Growth and EVP of sustainability, who has shaped the company's long-term approach to financial inclusion.

The original commitment dates back more than a decade. Mastercard first set a goal of bringing 500 million people into the formal financial system. During Covid, when many companies scaled back large commitments, Mastercard expanded the target to 1 billion people and added 60 million small businesses, with a focus on women-led businesses. The logic was both moral and commercial: bringing more people into the digital economy widens opportunity, strengthens local economies and deepens the trusted networks on which Mastercard depends.

Singh framed the strategy in one line: "Networks power the economy. And your proximity to networks determines your success."

When access becomes agency

Ellen Jackowski, Mastercard's Chief Sustainability Officer, pointed to a project in Egypt, where Mastercard helped move garment workers — a largely female workforce — from cash payments to digital wallets. When wages were paid in cash, many women had little control over what they earned. "The husband takes it, the father takes it," Jackowski recalled. A digital wallet did not erase deeper inequalities, but it gave workers direct control over their income and made it harder for someone else to physically take their wages.

Jackowski linked that shift to resilience. In places under pressure from drought, rising food prices and other climate-related shocks, digital financial tools help people absorb sudden strain because they can save and manage money more effectively.

A second example runs through Community Pass, including Farm Pass, which targets farmers in Africa. In many of those communities, supply chains have long been cash-based, inefficient and dependent on middlemen. Digital systems help farmers keep more of what they earn and participate in markets on better terms.

In India, the Mastercard Strive program She Leads Bharat:Udyam has reached 100,000 women entrepreneurs, including in Rajasthan, by helping them use digital tools to build and grow their businesses.

The business case for resilience is concrete. Research from the World Bank and the Mastercard Economics Institute found that during hurricanes, in-store sales at affected merchants fell 15.1% relative to baseline, while online sales declined 10.6%. The smallest losses were among merchants with more than 80% of sales online. For a small business owner, that gap can determine whether the business survives the shock.

From access to AI

Singh sees AI as part of the next chapter — not a pivot, but an extension of earlier work on data inequality. She pointed to Data.org, launched with the Rockefeller Foundation, and to Karya, a venture that creates paid digital work for low-income communities in India through structured local-language tasks that help train AI systems, generating jobs and royalties for workers. That, Singh said, represents "the powerful, positive possibilities that come with AI."

The shift from access to health also reflects how the economy has changed over the past decade — from analog to digital, from digital to data-driven and now toward AI. In that environment, connection alone does not create security. Trust, consumer protection and cybersecurity all matter.

Jackowski framed the whole agenda as "doing well by doing good," with Mastercard's impact strategy organized around three pillars: people, planet and prosperity.

Sustainability by removing friction

On climate, Mastercard has committed to reaching net zero by 2040 and runs the Carbon Calculator and the Priceless Planet Coalition, which is helping fund the restoration of 100 million trees across 22 sites.

The company also applies its payments infrastructure to waste reduction. At Blenheim Palace in the UK, Mastercard supported a reusable cup system that returns visitors' deposits almost instantly via reverse vending machines. Blenheim cut its spending on single-use cups from £100,000 to £50,000, while customer satisfaction improved.

The same model is now scaling in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, where a reusable takeaway packaging system lets customers pay a 5 DKK deposit and receive it back digitally when they return cups or containers at one of more than 54 reverse vending machines. The rollout builds on earlier success in Aarhus, with bowls and trays expected to follow.

The appeal, for Mastercard, is not persuasion but friction removal: most people want the sustainable choice to be the easy choice, and the company's role is to make better behavior feel natural.

With the 1 billion milestone reached, the test now shifts to whether Mastercard can convert raw access into durable financial health — and whether the network it has spent a decade building can keep people inside the economy, not just bring them to its edge.