The buzz on small biz

Welcome to Inside the Circles, your scoop on the people, tech and trends shaping the digital economy and beyond.

Small business owners are a passionate bunch. That’s why they start restaurants in unloved sections of their hometowns or build graphic design studios out of their garages. Most businesses in the U.S. are small businesses — in fact, over 99% of them are. 

To support all those companies and help them grow, Mastercard recently launched its new Small Business Navigator — a program providing entrepreneurs with tools, data and services, including data from the Mastercard Economics Institute and SpendingPulse, cybersecurity protections and virtual CFO support. Read all about it here. 

And if you’re a small business looking for some advice, check out this piece from Ginger Siegel, who leads Mastercard’s small business work in North America. A few pointers from Ginger’s piece: 

• 📱 Reach your customers where they are, which means having both a digital and physical presence. 

• 📈 Success takes patience: Strengthen your core product before looking to expand to new areas. 

• 💰 Separate your personal and business finances. That makes it much easier for a lender to say yes. 

Lastly, here are a bunch of AI tips and tricks small businesses can use. 

That's so money

Last week, Amsterdam was the home of Money 20/20 Europe, the continent’s top fintech conference of the year.

Mastercard teams were there to talk about payments, AI, crypto and cybersecurity. As part of the conference, Mastercard unveiled a new strategic partnership with Deutsche Bank to speed the development of open banking. Mastercard also announced that nearly half of Mastercard's European e-commerce transactions are now tokenized, one year into the company’s big push to make one-click checkout ubiquitous. Greg Ulrich (left in photo above), Mastercard’s chief AI and data officer, was there, talking about the new capabilities of agentic commerce, AI in cybersecurity and how Mastercard is embedding AI into more parts of the company. 

Also at the show, stablecoins made a big splash, with several new partnerships unveiled to expand the use of this cryptocurrency in payments. Mastercard in April announced its own end-to-end stablecoin capabilities, showing that interest in stablecoins has kept growing this year. 

Watch out

Viola Davis, Academy Award-winning actress, producer and New York Times bestselling author, shared powerful insights during this year’s Global Inclusive Growth Summit, hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, discussing the “dead weight” of growing up in abject poverty and her desire to give back because of that very upbringing. The discussion, with the Center’s president and founder Shamina Singh, highlights how philanthropy and giving are evolving for a changing world. 

The last word 

“When you think about a consumer experience today in payments, it's often what you're used to — digital, seamless, secure. That level of ease has not come into commercial payments nearly as much.” 

Raj Seshadri Mastercard’s chief commercial payments officer, in a FinTech Magazine cover story about the company’s work to expand the use of digitization and virtual card networks in the B2B world. 

ICYMI 

Circle of friends: Mastercard and PayPal are teaming up to develop new features for Mastercard One Credential, which gives a consumer a single payment credential they can use for a variety of payment options, like debit, credit and installments. Story from PYMNTS here. 

Broadcasting social good: NBCUniversal's Creative Impact Lab and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth announced a partnership to tell stories about social impact. Read more about it here.