What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

Most people can recognize the Visa and Mastercard brands. Chances are, you use one of their cards to transact every day. You may have some notion that most places (in the US) take both, but some places only take Visa (e.g. Costco), and vice versa. So what do they do? Here’s Visa’s attempt to answer that question. A few things they don’t do 1 : They aren’t the company that issues the card. Those…