Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mastercard held its initial public offering on the 25th of May 2006, selling 95.5 million shares at $39 each on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MA. Before the IPO, it had operated as a cooperative owned by more than 25,000 financial institutions.
Mastercard was founded in 1966 when Karl H. Hinke, an executive vice president at Marine Midland Bank, convened representatives of several banks in Buffalo, New York. The alliance was formed in response to Bank of America's BankAmericard (later Visa), after Bank of America refused to grant Marine Midland a regional license because the bank was too large.
Mastercard has faced multiple major antitrust actions. A class-action filed in January 1996 over debit card swipe fee price-fixing resulted in Mastercard and Visa paying approximately $3 billion in damages. A 1996 merchant lawsuit over tied-sale practices settled in 2003 for a multibillion-dollar payment that was the largest antitrust award in history at the time. In 2004, Mastercard paid American Express $1.8 billion for blocking it from U.S. bank partnerships.
In December 2010, Mastercard blocked all payments to WikiLeaks, citing claims that the organization engaged in illegal activity. The block prompted a denial-of-service attack by the activist group Anonymous, which took down the Mastercard website on the 8th and the 9th of December 2010. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said the block could be interpreted as an attempt to censor information.
The Priceless campaign has been Mastercard's primary advertising effort since 1997. Its slogan is "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard." The campaign applies to both credit and debit products and has been extended to promotional platforms including Priceless Travel and Priceless Cities.
Mastercard Contactless, formerly called PayPass, is an EMV-compatible payment feature based on the ISO/IEC 14443 standard that lets cardholders pay by tapping a card, phone, or key fob on a point-of-sale reader. Mastercard ran its first PayPass market trial in Orlando, Florida in 2003, involving more than 16,000 cardholders and more than 60 retail locations. Transaction limits vary by country and currency.