Bill Ackman added new positions in Visa, Mastercard and S&P Global, betting on fees tied to other companies’ customer activity

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square has disclosed new investments in payment network Visa and Mastercard, as well as information services firm S&P Global, according to a recent report by Yahoo Finance.

The three additions were described as Pershing Square’s biggest new stakes in the most recent set of changes, with the common theme that the companies earn revenue when somebody else’s customers transact.

Visa and Mastercard operate payment networks. In practice, that means their economics are linked to card usage and payment volumes across issuing banks, merchant acquiring partners and merchants, with fees collected during authorization and settlement of transactions.

S&P Global, while not a payments network, occupies a different link in a similar fee-and-flow business model, selling ratings, indices, analytics and other data services used in markets and corporate finance. Its revenue streams are largely tied to demand for those services from institutions rather than consumer spending at the cash register.

The report frames the stakes as “toll” businesses, where the party receiving payments is largely dependent on transaction activity from other players in the ecosystem. That is a distinct posture compared with companies whose results are driven primarily by their own direct sales volumes.

What Pershing Square did not lay out in the brief Yahoo Finance account is the depth of each position, the timing of purchases, or the specific cost basis details that would show how quickly the firm built the exposure. Those elements typically come through in the detailed regulatory filing and related schedules, which were not reproduced in the account.

In the broader market context, payment networks and market-data providers have often been viewed as beneficiaries of a larger, structural trend toward digitized finance. For investors, the key question tends to be whether network fees and data subscription demand can stay resilient across credit cycles and shifts in how banks and corporations route payments and procurement.

Still, investors are likely to watch for disclosures around whether these new stakes are concentrated or diversified, and whether Pershing Square is pairing the moves with other positions that hedge regulatory, competition or credit-cycle risk. The next clear datapoint will be the full filing language and any subsequent commentary that clarifies the firm’s thesis and time horizon.