Card networks are cemented into the payment process, but their product offerings extend far beyond that.
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 that they're just tagging on to their core products, either. They're core pieces of the company's strategy (judging by Visa's 2025 Investor Day deck).
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 card network products 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.
About the author
Shane Curran is the founder and CEO of Evervault, a Series B company building developer infrastructure to collect, process, share, and enrich sensitive data like credit cards, wallets, and PII.
About the company
Evervault is a card data infrastructure platform for developers, combining sensitive data encryption with standalone payment capabilities like 3DS and Network Tokens. We encrypt card data to minimise PCI scope and give you the flexibility to route payments across all your PSPs. Our modular products provide the building blocks to launch and scale your payments stack quickly, with less engineering effort and compliance overhead.
