Visa and Mastercard, processing billions of payment transactions yearly, reported strong financial growth in 2025, driven by rising payment volumes and cross-border transactions. However, their massive operations generate significant carbon emissions, pushing them to adopt sustainability and net zero strategies.
How do they balance profit and sustainability? This article uncovers Visa and Mastercard’s financial strength and net zero initiatives – who’s making the biggest impact on emissions reduction and climate action.
Strong Numbers, Stronger Strategy: Visa’s Q1 2025 Performance
Visa reported strong Q1 2025 results, with net revenue rising 10% year-over-year (YoY) to $9.5 billion. Net income also increased 5% to $5.1 billion, while GAAP earnings per share (EPS) grew 8% to $2.58 and non-GAAP EPS stood at $2.75. Visa’s board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.59 per share.
The company attributed its growth to strong consumer spending, a rise in payment volume, and an increase in cross-border transactions. CEO Ryan McInerney highlighted three major growth drivers:
- Consumer payments,
- New payment flows, and
- Value-added services.
These areas continue to expand as Visa strengthens its global network.
A key move during the quarter was Visa’s acquisition of Featurespace, an artificial intelligence-powered fraud protection firm. This acquisition aligns with Visa’s long-term goal of enhancing transaction security.
While Visa continues to grow, its expenses are also increasing, particularly in research and development. However, its strong revenue growth has helped maintain profitability and reinforce its position as a leader in the payments industry.
Mastering Growth: How Mastercard Outpaced Expectations
Mastercard posted strong 2024 results, with net revenue increasing 12% YoY to $28.2 billion, beating market expectations. Adjusted EPS grew 19% to $14.60, exceeding analyst estimates. Its adjusted operating margin improved slightly to 58.4%.
In Q4 2024, Mastercard’s gross dollar volume reached $2.6 trillion, up 12% YoY. Cross-border volumes, a key revenue driver, rose 20%, while switched transactions increased 11% to 42.2 billion. The company’s value-added services generated $3.1 billion in revenue, up 16%.
Mastercard’s value-added services and solutions business also played a critical role in its financial performance. Net revenue from these services reached $3.1 billion, a 16% YoY increase, driven by demand for security, digital authentication, and market insights.
Unlike Visa, Mastercard experienced a sharper increase in operating expenses, which climbed by 14% YoY to $3.3 billion. The rise was mainly due to higher general and administrative costs. However, adjusted operating income still grew by 15% YoY to $4.22 billion.
Both Visa and Mastercard reported strong financial growth, but Mastercard outpaced Visa in revenue, EPS growth, and transaction volume. Visa focused on operational efficiency and security investments, while Mastercard’s cross-border transactions and value-added services drove its growth.
A Green Rivalry: Who’s Leading the Sustainability and Net Zero Race?
Despite rising expenses, both companies remain leaders in the global payments industry. However, their massive operations with billions of transactions processed annually generate carbon emissions, prompting them to reduce their environmental footprint. While they share common goals, their sustainability and net zero approaches differ.
Swiping Towards Sustainability: Visa’s Carbon Goals and Green Investments
Visa aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, aligning with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C pathway. It has been carbon neutral in its operations since 2020, achieving this by reducing direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and purchasing carbon offsets. The company sources 100% renewable electricity for its offices and data centers, significantly cutting GHG emissions.
Visa has made notable strides in reducing its operational emissions, particularly in Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which saw a downward trend from 2009 to 2022. However, in 2023, Scope 1 and 2 emissions increased from 6,400 to 10,600 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, primarily due to a slight uptick in Scope 2 emissions, rising from zero in 2022 to 300 metric tons.
Despite this, Visa continues to offset its emissions significantly toward net zero. The payment processor has invested in carbon offsets equivalent to 66,300 metric tons of CO2 in 2023.
In terms of Scope 3 emissions, Visa experienced a slight rise in 2023, reaching 409,500 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. This is driven mainly by increases in employee commuting and business travel, while emissions from purchased goods and services saw a small decrease.
Carbon Offsets, Green Finance, and Climate Tech Solutions
Visa invests in renewable energy projects and high-quality carbon offset programs. The company supports global reforestation initiatives and clean energy transition projects.
In 2023, Visa’s environmental investments helped mitigate the equivalent of 400,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
The payment processor’s sustainability efforts extend to financial products. Visa has partnered with fintech firms to introduce carbon footprint tracking tools for consumers.
Through the Visa Eco Benefits program, banks can offer sustainability-focused rewards and carbon offset options. Additionally, Visa has worked with financial institutions to issue over 20 million eco-friendly payment cards made from recycled materials or biodegradable alternatives.
Furthermore, Visa is integrating sustainability into mobility and payment solutions. The company supports contactless payments for public transit to reduce reliance on cash and has collaborated with EV charging networks to streamline payments.
The company is also investing in climate-focused fintech startups that develop solutions for carbon tracking and sustainable finance. However, compared to its competitor, its indirect emissions strategy is less aggressive.
Priceless Progress: Mastercard’s Commitment to a Net-Zero Future
Mastercard has been carbon neutral in its operations since 2021 and aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. Like Visa, it sources 100% renewable electricity for its offices and data centers.
Mastercard has made significant progress in reducing its GHG emissions as part of its commitment to environmental sustainability. In 2023, the company achieved a 1% reduction in total emissions, totaling 557,545 metric tons of CO2 equivalent across Scope 1, 2, and 3.
Notably, its Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which account for 9% of total GHG emissions, decreased by 7%, producing 52,054 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. These emissions have declined significantly, 48%, from its 2016 baseline.
For Scope 3 emissions, which make up 78% of the company’s total emissions, Mastercard saw a 3% reduction in its supply chain emissions in 2023, totaling 437,588 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
The payment processor remains on track to meet its 2025 targets of reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 38% and Scope 3 emissions by 20% compared to 2016 levels.
Mastercard‘s Scope 3 emissions came from indirect sources, primarily from its financial partners and supply chain. To address this, the company has integrated sustainability criteria into its vendor selection process and encourages its banking partners to reduce their own carbon footprints.
Mastercard’s Green Finance and Reforestation Efforts
Mastercard takes a different approach to carbon offsets and net zero from Visa. The company launched the Priceless Planet Coalition, a global reforestation initiative aiming to restore 100 million trees by 2025.
Through this initiative, Mastercard has already funded the planting of 60 million trees across 20 countries, aiming to remove approximately 10 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2030.
Mastercard has also taken the lead in sustainable financial tools. The Mastercard Carbon Calculator, developed with Doconomy, allows consumers to track the carbon footprint of their purchases directly within their banking apps. Over 50 banks worldwide have integrated this tool, helping millions of users make informed spending decisions.
Additionally, Mastercard has expanded its ESG-linked financial products, including green bonds and sustainability-focused credit cards. In 2023, the company supported the issuance of $500 million in ESG-linked financial products, reinforcing its commitment to sustainable finance.
Mastercard is also investing in climate technology and EV infrastructure. It has partnered with global EV charging networks to streamline payment processes and promote wider EV adoption. The company is also funding fintech startups that focus on climate risk management and sustainable investment platforms.
Visa vs. Mastercard: Who Leads in Sustainability?
Both Visa and Mastercard are making significant strides in financials and net zero. They both have achieved carbon neutrality in their operations, but Mastercard appears to have a more comprehensive and aggressive approach.
By integrating sustainability into financial products, investing in large-scale reforestation, and actively reducing indirect emissions, Mastercard sets a higher standard in climate action. Visa, on the other hand, excels in operational efficiency and renewable energy adoption but may need to expand its influence over its financial network to achieve a more substantial impact.
The post Visa vs. Mastercard: Who’s Leading the Charge in Finance, Sustainability, and Net Zero? appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Renewable Energy11 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits