Company patents
Mastercard International Incorporated
Mastercard International Incorporated's patent strategy is heavily concentrated in Business Methods & Fintech, accounting for 73.1% of its portfolio, yet this core area has seen a consistent decline in new patent filings, with a -6.2% YoY drop in 2025 and a -49.0% decline so far in 2026. This suggests a surprising shift away from its primary domain, with a broader trend of decreasing patent activity across nearly all categories, including significant drops in Cryptographic Mechanisms (-27.4% YoY in 2025) and Network Security & Access Control (-3.4% YoY in 2025).
Patent Trend by Technology Area
Yearly patent publications since 2023
Product themes
Product-level themes inferred from filings since 2023, with category chips showing where each theme appears. Select a theme to filter the patents below.
1,403 US filings (since 2023) · 12 categories · 38 themes
Systems designed to streamline and automate various commercial transactions, including mobile-enhanced processes, secure online checkouts, customer service interactions, and privilege issuance, often leveraging digital authentication.
Systems and methods for authenticating users, devices, or applications, authorizing their access to resources based on policies, and managing digital identities across various platforms.
Focuses on using distributed ledger technology (DLT) like blockchain to secure financial transactions, manage digital identities, or ensure data integrity and traceability across various applications.
Technologies for securing, managing, and transacting with virtual currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other blockchain-based digital assets, including hardware wallets and tokenization schemes for various purposes.
Systems and methods for encrypting data at a fine-grained level (e.g., per data unit or based on sensitivity) and controlling access to it, often involving delegated authorization, contextual policies, or secure data sharing.
Mechanisms to facilitate the secure exchange of data between different entities or systems while enforcing usage policies, managing digital content rights, and ensuring data consistency during replication or transfer.
Systems and methods designed to ensure adherence to regulatory rules, corporate policies, or contractual agreements, often involving automated validation of electronic transactions, smart contract enforcement, or API governance.
Techniques for protecting data at rest or in backup, ensuring its integrity, confidentiality, and verifiable origin, often involving encryption, unique identifiers, or secure repositories.
Methods and systems for integrating, transforming, and managing complex or domain-specific data from disparate sources into a unified structure, often for specific applications like social networks, genomics, or business forms.
Techniques for distributing computational tasks, data storage, and service logic across cloud data centers, edge devices, and user equipment to improve performance, resilience, or resource utilization. This includes architectures for split rendering, decentralized ledgers, and microservices.
Systems and methods for identifying and blocking unauthorized access, malicious activities, or abnormal behavior within a network by analyzing traffic, system logs, or behavioral patterns.
Systems and methods for uniquely identifying, tracking, and managing physical items using scannable codes (barcodes, QR codes) or wireless tags (RFID, IoT devices) to link physical objects to digital information, inventory, or services.
Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to enhance cryptographic systems, such as generating encryption models, improving zero-trust architectures, or enabling privacy-preserving computations like federated learning.
Systems that use user data, preferences, and machine learning to generate tailored advice, product recommendations, goal-setting plans, or contextual information for individuals across different domains.
Systems that process data to provide personalized recommendations, predict events, or automate decision-making processes based on learned patterns, user behavior, or environmental factors.
Systems and methods utilizing artificial intelligence, particularly large language models and neural networks, to extract, summarize, generate, or categorize information from unstructured or semi-structured data sources.
Techniques for monitoring system components and behaviors to anticipate failures, performance degradation, or anomalies, often leveraging machine learning for pattern recognition and forecasting.
Methods and systems for identifying, extracting, and structuring specific entities, relationships, or insights from text-based documents, often involving techniques like named entity recognition, relation extraction, or summarization.
Methods and systems for generating, distributing, updating, rotating, and securely destroying cryptographic keys to maintain data confidentiality and integrity over time, including quantum key distribution.
Utilizing machine learning, particularly deep learning, to analyze medical data such as images, sensor readings, or physiological signals for disease prediction, diagnosis, or treatment assessment.
Methods and systems for efficiently allocating computing resources, balancing workloads, and managing power states to improve performance, reduce energy consumption, or enhance reliability in computing platforms.
Utilizing dedicated hardware components, secure enclaves, or trusted execution environments to perform cryptographic operations, enhancing security, performance, or isolation from software vulnerabilities.
Platforms and methods for aggregating data from diverse sources, generating dynamic content, and delivering it efficiently to users, often involving social media, programmatic advertising, or interactive experiences within cloud environments.
Mobile applications and systems leveraging wireless communication and location data (e.g., GPS, RFID, geo-fencing) to provide context-specific services, transactions, or user interactions.
Methods and systems for monitoring, controlling, and managing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their communication networks, often involving adaptive or intelligent frameworks for data acquisition, relay, and automation.
Systems and methods for automating multi-step tasks, business processes, or service interactions, often involving AI agents, programmable interfaces, or formal orchestration languages to streamline operations.
Focuses on the physical construction and integration of electronic components, such as antennas, IC chips, and display elements, into smart cards or secure documents, often involving multi-layer structures and specialized materials.
Systems and methods for automating the lifecycle of machine learning models, including pipeline deployment, model management, versioning, and configuring for different inference environments.
Techniques for generating human-like text or other content using large pre-trained models, often involving prompt engineering, speculative decoding, or multi-modal inputs for content creation.
Methods for training machine learning models across multiple decentralized devices or servers while keeping data localized, often involving aggregation of model parameters and secure communication.
Developing and applying machine learning algorithms that leverage quantum computing principles, such as quantum circuits or autoencoders, for tasks like simulation or data processing.
Technologies for establishing and maintaining secure communication channels between devices or networks, often employing encryption, secure protocols, or virtual private networks (VPNs).
Techniques for combining and analyzing information from multiple distinct data modalities (e.g., text, image, video, audio, sensor data) to derive richer insights or improve system performance and decision-making.
Technologies for deploying, managing, and governing applications and services in cloud environments, particularly focusing on containerization, microservice architectures, API gateways, and distributed data management.
Technologies enabling the creation and management of virtual computing environments, including virtual machines and virtual desktops, with an emphasis on secure and efficient remote access, updates, and performance.
Focuses on establishing and enforcing quality standards for software development, deployment, and infrastructure configuration, utilizing automated validation, testing, and governance frameworks.
AI systems designed to engage in natural language dialogue, maintain conversation state, understand user intent, and generate relevant responses, often across multiple communication channels or modalities.
Systems enabling wireless communication between vehicles (V2V), vehicles and infrastructure (V2I), or vehicles and other entities (V2X) to share information for traffic management, safety, and navigation.
Patents
Showing 1-10 of 63
Specialized Data Integration