Card networks are more than just payment rails

You inevitably look at external vendors to complete your stack when building a fintech or financial product. There are payment service providers (PSPs), know your customer solutions (KYC), fraud prevention tools, identity verification services, etc. Each one you add usually means another contract and another integration. Many companies don't realise that card networks like Visa and Mastercard actually provide a lot of these services now.

More than payment rails

There's an assumption that card networks exist only for payment processing. But both Visa and Mastercard have built out large product catalogues that go beyond moving money.

A quick look at Mastercard's developer APIs shows around 90 products. They even have an API specifically for Mexico Insights. Similarly, Visa offers API-based products for underwriting, fraud prevention, managing card benefits, retrieving foreign exchange rates, and much more. These aren't solutions they're just tagging on to their core products either. They're core pieces of the company's strategy.

If you look at just the fraud and identity products, there are some pretty compelling benefits. Because Visa and Mastercard process payments globally, their transaction datasets are larger than those of many other financial services companies. If a card is used consistently at the same grocery store in California and then suddenly appears in Mexico City, the network has already seen that signal and can surface it. That behavioural context is available through the same set of APIs.

Why Visa and Mastercard's value-added services are worth evaluating

The data is first-party. Visa and Mastercard aren't aggregating signals from other sources because they are the source. That means verification and fraud signals can be more accurate than what a third-party provider can offer.

As infrastructure providers, Visa and Mastercard are both highly reliable. For example, VisaNet operated at 6-nines (99.9999%) in 2025, which is quite a bit higher than many infrastructure companies. That's of course on a global scale and at high volumes. Many of the individual card network APIs are performant as well because the data that's exchanged is pretty lightweight.

Consolidation also simplifies your stack. Instead of managing separate providers for fraud detection, verification, and data enrichment, you may be able to get a significant portion of that from networks you're already integrated with. This can be super powerful in situations where you just need to pass an extra field on an API call to open up a new set of data or functionality (e.g., adding name validation to an existing flow for depositing funds into an account).

A barrier worth mentioning

Despite the breadth of what's available, many companies don't use these products. Part of the reason is awareness and that teams just don't know they exist. The other reason is that getting to production can take a long time.

For developer products, sandbox access is typically self-serve and you can get something up and running without much interaction with the card networks. Moving to production is often more difficult. It can sometimes require working with an account manager or going through a certification process. In some cases, the entire process can take months of coordination. This is where network enablers like Evervault come in. They give you access to card network APIs without having to integrate directly with Visa and Mastercard, which saves a lot of time.

Making the call

Whether card network products are the right choice depends on your situation, and there's no straightforward answer. It depends heavily on your resourcing, what you're building, and when you need to go live. The starting point is the same though. Check into what card networks and network enablers offer before defaulting to specialist vendors. It's worth the upfront research, especially for a decision that can impact your payment stack for years to come.