The fierce battle between payment champions Visa and Mastercard is also being played out in France on the sports field (AFP/Archives/-)
The fierce battle between payment champions Visa and Mastercard is also being played out in France on the sports field, via their respective partnerships for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and the Rugby World Cup.
Payment “is a very competitive sector”, points out to AFP Magali Tézenas du Montcel, general manager of Sporsora, an association bringing together players in the sports economy in France.
During a transaction, Visa and Mastercard play the role of intermediary between the buyer, the merchant and their respective banks.
Archi-dominant in the world, the two Americans remain not very powerful in France, which has its own internal system, the “Bank cards” group and its CB brand. Mastercard would weigh only 8% of payments in the country according to data collected by the fintech Yavin, Visa 17% and CB 75%.
The idea of sponsorship “is to get closer to consumers”, explains Benoit Ripault, marketing director of Mastercard in France, to AFP.
The company is counting on the Rugby World Cup which will take place in several cities in France between September 8 and October 28 to be better known to the general public.
For Visa, according to a statement sent to AFP, the Olympic Games are an opportunity to “help companies benefit from the economic opportunities” of the event, in particular through the offer of tickets.
The audience for the two competitions goes far beyond France: nearly four billion viewers are for example expected for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, between July 26 and August 11.
According to the International Rugby Federation, the last World Cup, won by South Africa in 2019 in Japan, was the most watched rugby event of all time, with more than 850 million people in the world.
– Values and big money –
Beyond the media coverage of an event that takes place every four years, associating your brand with a sports discipline can allow you to benefit from a kind of transfer of the values generally associated with this sport.
With “growing popularity”, rugby “carries values very aligned with the commitments” of Mastercard, underlines Mr. Ripault, citing integrity, respect or inclusion.
The fierce battle between payment champions Visa and Mastercard is also being played out in France on the sports field (AFP/Archives/-)
On the Olympic Games side, the professor of sports marketing at the University of Paris-Saclay Michel Desbordes highlights the “universality” of the competition and its planetary dimension.
Mastercard and Visa are the biggest spending sponsors for these two events with budgets running into the tens of millions for World Rugby and even hundreds of millions for the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The return on investment, always difficult to measure, is however scrutinized. Rugby fans “do not hesitate to travel” and have “strong purchasing power”, observes the marketing director of Mastercard.
Rugby World Cup organizers expect up to 600,000 visitors when 10 million tickets go on sale for the 2024 Paris Olympics, according to the organizing committee (Cojo).
– No neighborhood in store –
The war between the two payment companies is also transposing to stores.
Visa was the first to shoot, by preventing any payment by bank card other than Visa cards in the official Parisian shops of the Olympic Games.
“We don’t have the same bias”, replies the Mastercard spokesperson, “there are no restrictions in all the official points of sale of the competitions that we sponsor”.
Could Mastercard afford it anyway? The company is far from having the same rate of equipment as its competitor in France.
“We prefer to bring additional benefits to our cardholders rather than restricting the possibility of paying”, continues Mr. Ripault, such as the installation of cash registers dedicated to Mastercard customers, faster, in the ephemeral shop on Place de la Concorde which opened last week.
The Rugby World Cup has also enabled Mastercard to enter into a privileged agreement with another sponsor of the event, Société Générale, which distributes Mastercard cards to its rugby fan customers only, without the possibility of paying via CB.
The banking group BPCE, a premium partner of Paris 2024 (a notch below Visa) has done the same with Visa, which further promotes its market share in France.
© 2023 AFP
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