I ask why would I care because banks invest heavily in making sure customers know on which circuit their cards operate on. However, most places accept both MasterCard and Visa (and potentially others, depending on the country).
In: Economics
This is actually a fairly interesting topic.
Visa and Mastercard to compete for your use of their cards. When signing up for a new credit card, you may not look at whether its a visa or mastercard that you are getting since they are often so widespread, but they do impact what you do look at: card rewards.
Credit card rewards generally get the money needed to find them by the use of the credit card interchange fee. This is a hidden fee levied on a per transaction basis onto the store you are buying from, is often 1% to 3% depending on class of card. This does not go to mastercard or visa, another smaller fee does. This fee goes to the bank who assigned you this card.
This produces a balance that needs to be struck here. Banks want more customers, so they compete with eachother by giving greater rewards, funded by the interchange fee. Raise the interchange fee too high, companies will stop accepting your card or deincentives its use because it eats into their profits. But if you don’t raise the interchange fee for banks, banks will go to the other payment processor and ask them to raise the interchange fee. This means your competitor gets more cards and as a result more income instead of you.
This has become a bit of a problem lately since interchange fees have constantly been going up as a result. Kroger for instance stopped accepting Visa for a brief period last year due to high fees. This has largely resulted in a bit of a hidden corporate war currently playing out to figure out how to handle payment processing with all of this in mind.
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