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Mastercard beat Wall Street expectations for third-quarter profit on Thursday, as sustained consumer spending boosted its payment volumes. Consumer spending has proven resilient, while labor market cracks and sticky inflation continue to fuel concerns over U.S. President Donald Trump's trade and immigration policies. Mastercard's earnings round off the earnings season for card companies, which are closely tracked by Wall Street to gauge consumer health. Due to their expansive share of global everyday transactions, card networks run by Mastercard and Visa are widely perceived as shielded from a potential payments slowdown. Rival Visa also beat quarterly profit expectations earlier this week, while American Express' focus on wealthy customers helped it rake in record revenue during the third quarter. The company reported adjusted profit of $3.96 billion, or $4.38 per share, for the quarter ended September 30. Analysts, on average, were expecting a profit of $4.32 per share, according to data compiled by LSEG. Mastercard's net revenue rose 17 per cent to $8.6 billion in the quarter from a year earlier. A bottleneck of Federal data due to the U.S. government shutdown has added uncertainty to the consumer outlook at a time when private data suggests plummeting consumer sentiment and a widening rift between lower-income and affluent consumers. Mastercard's value-added services and solutions business, which now makes up more than a third of the company's business, fetched 25 per cent higher revenue in the quarter. The company has diversified its revenue streams to leverage the burgeoning demand for threat intelligence and fraud reduction via value-added services. Cross-border volume, which tracks spending on cards outside the country of their issue, jumped 15 per cent on a local currency basis. Shares of the Purchase, New York-based card network giant fell marginally before the bell.
