Circle Valuation Multiples

Visa Inc. is a global payments technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that operates the world's second-largest card payment network after China UnionPay. Its origins lie in BankAmericard, launched by Bank of America in Fresno on 18 September 1958; the network was rebranded Visa in 1976 and the company listed in 2008. Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set consumer rates and fees; instead it provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products and processes transactions over VisaNet, which runs from four data centers. In 2025 its network handled about 257.5 billion transactions worth US$14.2 trillion. For fiscal 2024 it reported revenue of US$35.9 billion and net income of US$19.7 billion with about 31,600 employees, earned from service, data processing and international transaction fees. Ryan McInerney is chief executive. Visa Canada joined the consortium that bought Aeroplan in 2019.

Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE: MA) is a US payments technology company headquartered at 2000 Purchase Street in Purchase, New York. It operates a global card payment network that switches transactions between issuing banks, acquirers, merchants, consumers, businesses and governments in more than 220 countries and territories, and rather than issuing cards itself it provides transaction processing and related payment services. It also sells value-added services and solutions, including security and authentication, consumer engagement and business insights, and its acquisitions include Vocalink in 2016 for $920 million, Brighterion in 2017 and Recorded Future in 2024 for $2.65 billion. In 2025 gross dollar volume on its network reached $10.6 trillion, up 9% in local currency, and net revenue was $32.8 billion, up 16%, with operating income of $18.9 billion, net income of $15.0 billion and about 39,800 employees. It earns fees on payment volume, switched transactions and cross-border activity, net of rebates and incentives paid to customers, plus fees for value-added services. The company traces its origins to the Interbank Card Association, formed in 1966 by Karl Hinke of Marine Midland Bank and other banks, and went public on the NYSE on May 25, 2006; Michael Miebach is chief executive.

American Express is a New York City-based global payments and financial services company headquartered at 200 Vesey Street. It issues charge and credit cards to consumers and businesses, runs its own card network and merchant business, and provides travel and financial services through units such as Travel Related Services. It earns discount revenue from merchants, card fees and interest on card loans. In 2025 it reported revenue of USD 72.2 billion and net income of USD 10.8 billion with about 76,800 employees, and it had 141.2 million cards in force at the end of 2023. The company traces its origins to 18 March 1850, when express businesses owned by Henry Wells, William Fargo and John Warren Butterfield merged in Buffalo, New York. It sold half of its corporate travel arm, American Express Global Business Travel, to a Certares-led group in 2014 and retains a stake of about 33.5%. Its Travel Related Services subsidiary invested in Portable Software, later Concur Technologies, in 1998.

Charles Schwab is one of the largest retail-oriented financial-services companies in the US, with $11.9 trillion in client assets across its brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, financial advisory, and wealth management businesses at the end of 2025. While best known for its retail brokerage offering, Schwab generates the lion’s share of its revenue and profits through its Charles Schwab Bank and asset management segments. The firm is a dominant player in Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) custody, with over 40% market share, and has recently pushed into wealth management with robo-advisory, direct indexing, and other managed-investment solutions.

S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. Its ratings business is the largest credit rating agency in the world and S&P's largest segment by profitability. S&P's largest segment by revenue is market intelligence, which provides desktop, data and advisory solutions, enterprise solutions, and credit/risk solutions mostly in the financial-services industry. S&P's other segments include energy (formerly commodity insights, this segment includes Platts and other data), mobility (Carfax), and indexes. S&P plans to spin off mobility in 2026.

Capital One Financial is a diversified financial services holding company headquartered in McLean, Virginia. Originally a spinoff of Signet Financial’s credit card division in 1994, the company is now primarily involved in credit card lending, auto loans, and commercial lending. Following the acquisition of Discover in 2025, the firm also has a modest personal loan business, though credit card lending provides the majority of the bank's revenue.

Based in Chicago, CME Group operates exchanges giving investors, suppliers, and businesses the ability to trade futures and derivatives based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign currencies, energy, metals, and commodities. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was founded in 1898 and in 2002 completed its IPO. Since then, CME Group has consolidated parts of the industry by merging with crosstown rival CBOT Holdings in 2007 before acquiring Nymex Holdings in 2008 and NEX in 2018. In addition, the company has a 27% stake in S&P Dow Jones Indices, making the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the exclusive venue to trade and clear S&P futures contracts. Through CME's acquisition of NEX, it also expanded into cash foreign exchange, fixed-income trading, and collateral optimization.

Intercontinental Exchange is a vertically integrated operator of financial exchanges and provides ancillary data products. Though the company is probably best known for its ownership of the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013, ICE operates a large derivatives exchange, too. The company's largest commodity futures product is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. In addition to the exchanges business, which is about 54% of net revenue, Intercontinental Exchange has used a series of acquisitions to create its mortgage technology business (22% of net revenue) and fixed-income and data-services segment (24% of net revenue).

Intuit serves small and midsize businesses with accounting software QuickBooks and online marketing platform Mailchimp. The company also operates retail tax filing tool TurboTax, personal finance platform Credit Karma, and a suite of professional tax offerings for accountants. Founded in the mid-1980s, Intuit enjoys a dominant market share for small-to-midsize business accounting and self-serve tax filing in the US.

Moody’s, along with S&P Ratings, is a leading provider of credit ratings on fixed-income securities. The ratings segment, Moody’s Investors Service, includes corporates, structured finance, financial institutions, and public finance ratings. MIS represents a majority of the firm’s profit and often (depending on bond issuance levels) a majority of the firm's revenue. The other segment, Moody’s Analytics, consists of decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information.

MercadoLibre is a publicly listed e-commerce and financial technology company founded in Buenos Aires in 1999 by Marcos Galperin. It operates an online marketplace, the Mercado Pago payments and credit business, the Mercado Envios logistics network and an advertising unit across eighteen Latin American countries. The company is incorporated in Delaware, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol MELI and has its headquarters in Montevideo, Uruguay. It reported revenues of 28.9 billion dollars for 2025 and operating income of 3.2 billion dollars, with about 123,670 employees. Its commerce and fintech services reached 131 million unique buyers over the twelve months to the second quarter of 2026. The company has grown through acquisitions of classifieds portals, logistics and payments businesses and through minority investments made partly through its corporate venture fund.

Robinhood is a diversified financial services provider best known for its retail brokerage platform, which historically caters to a young, risk-seeking clientele that trades heavily on margin and in higher-risk asset classes like options, futures, cryptocurrencies, and more recently, in prediction markets. As those customers’ financial needs have begun to mature, Robinhood has rolled out a suite of more conventional products, from retirement accounts to high-yield cash sweep accounts to nascent advisory services (Robinhood Strategies). With $322 billion in customer assets and 27 million active accounts at year-end 2025, the firm has emerged as a significant player in the large, growing US brokerage market.

Bajaj Finance Ltd is the holding company for various financial services businesses under the Bajaj Group, which operates in India. The company is an NBFC in India offering payments, partnerships, services, and lending solutions to customers. The company's model is focused on the acquisition of customers and offering multiple loans and services on a cross-sell basis to meet their financial service needs. The company provides discretionary spending across consumer electronics, furniture, and digital products in India. The company's strategies and structure are closely aligned with those of commercial banks in India. All of its revenue is generated from India.

Deutsche Boerse is a financial exchange company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. The company primarily generates revenue through its Eurex and Clearstream segments. Eurex allows for the trading and clearing of derivatives. Clearstream offers custody and settlement services for domestic and international securities, as well as collateral management services. Other segments include Xetra, which generates revenue through trading and clearing cash equities, STOXX (an index business), and several others.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing is a vertically integrated securities exchange business offering listing, data, trading, clearing and settlement services across equities, debt and derivatives. HKEx, like Hong Kong itself, functions as a gateway between China and the rest of the world. HKEx serves as a preferred listing venue for Chinese companies outside of China and, through the Connect Scheme, offers two-way trading for a growing group of financial products with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

London Stock Exchange Group is a financial-markets infrastructure and information group operating exchanges, clearing, index, data, and workflow businesses. The organization serves B2B, B2G customers and counterparties through the operating assets, products, or financial capabilities described in the cited transaction materials. Its principal economics are Services, Subscription, Licensing, while its competitive position depends on sector expertise, asset quality, customer relationships, execution, and disciplined capital allocation. The business was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in London. The 2007 investment concerned the newly formed listed group around the London Stock Exchange and gave Qatar Holding a strategic blocking-scale position. The profile reflects the legal or operating business at the transaction date, including its historical identity where a subsequent listing, merger, privatization, disposal, or reorganization changed its name or ownership.

Nasdaq is an American financial technology and exchange operator headquartered at One Liberty Plaza in New York City and listed on its own Nasdaq Stock Market (NDAQ) as an S&P 500 member. It was founded on February 8, 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers as the world's first electronic stock market and became a public company in 2000. It runs the Nasdaq Stock Market, the Philadelphia and Boston stock exchanges and seven Nordic and Baltic exchanges in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Iceland, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn and Vilnius, which came from its 2008 combination with OMX. The company earns listing and trading fees, sells market data, indexes and analytics, and licenses capital-markets, risk, regulatory and anti-financial-crime software to banks, brokers, asset managers, corporates and other exchanges. Its financial technology business was built largely through acquisitions of fraud-detection provider Verafin in 2020 and risk and regulatory software maker Adenza in 2023. In 2025 Nasdaq reported revenue of $8.26 billion and net income of $1.79 billion, and it had 9,162 employees in 2024. Adena Friedman is chair and chief executive.

Nubank is a digital banking platform headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, operated by the listed holding company Nu Holdings Ltd (NYSE: NU). It was founded on 6 May 2013 by David Velez and began with a no-fee credit card managed entirely from a mobile app. The group now offers accounts, credit cards, personal loans, insurance and investment products to retail customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. In the first quarter of 2026 it reported 135.2 million customers worldwide, 115 million of them in Brazil, and quarterly revenue above USD 5 billion. It has grown partly through acquisitions, including Plataformatec, Cognitect, Easynvest, Olivia and Hyperplane, and in July 2026 agreed to acquire Banco Porto Real de Investimentos to obtain a Brazilian banking licence. It also invests in fintech start-ups abroad, such as Tyme Group.

Strategy Inc is a bitcoin treasury company and a provider of business intelligence services. It is designed to provide investors varying degrees of economic exposure to Bitcoin by offering a range of securities, including equity and fixed-income instruments. The company also provides industry AI-powered enterprise analytics software. It has one reportable operating segment: the Software Business, which is engaged in the design, development, marketing, and sales of the company's enterprise analytics software platform through cloud subscriptions and licensing arrangements and related services (i.e., product support, consulting, and education). Geographically, the company operates in EMEA, U.S. and Other Regions, of which maximum revenue is derived from U.S..

Constellation Software is an acquirer, manager, and developer of vertical market software, or VMS, businesses globally. VMS differentiates from horizontal software in that it provides mission critical solutions within a specific industry for customers in a particular market. Constellation operates through a decentralized model in which each business operates as its own independent entity. Managers of individual businesses are incentivized to optimize their business for returns on invested capital and revenue growth. Excess cash generated by the individual businesses is repatriated to portfolio managers who focus on allocating as much capital as possible on new acquisitions. As of 2025, Constellation consisted of over 1,000 individual businesses and 64,000 employees.

Founded in 2009, Block provides payment services to merchants, along with related services. The company also launched Cash App, a person-to-person payment network. In 2025, Square's payment volume was almost USD 260 million.

National Stock Exchange of India Ltd operates a vertically integrated stock exchange. It offers an integrated platform for trading, clearing, listing and other services such as data feed services, data terminal services and licensing services. The company's platform manages regulatory compliance, risk monitoring, and post-trade settlement. It offers various products across multiple asset classes, including cash market, futures, options, mutual funds platform, commodity derivatives, exchange-traded currency derivatives, wholesale debt market and interest rate futures. The majority of the company's revenue is derived from transaction charges.

PayPal was spun off from eBay in 2015 and provides electronic payment solutions to merchants and consumers, with a focus on online transactions. The company had 434 million active accounts at the end of 2024. The company also owns Venmo, a person-to-person payment platform.

Thomson Reuters is a leading global provider of business information services, delivering trusted data, technology, and expertise to professionals across legal, tax, accounting, risk, compliance, and the news and media sectors. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company combines deep domain knowledge with data and software solutions to help clients make informed decisions, manage complexity, and drive efficiency. Thomson Reuters serves legal and accounting/tax professionals, corporations, and governments worldwide, but around 75% of revenue is generated in the US. The company is known for flagship products such as Westlaw, UltraTax CS, and Reuters News.

MSCI has described its mission as enabling investors to build better portfolios for a better world. MSCI's largest and most profitable segment is its index segment, where it provides benchmarking to asset managers and asset owners. MSCI boasts over $18 trillion in benchmarked assets, including over $2.3 trillion in ETF assets linked to MSCI indexes. The MSCI analytics segment provides portfolio management and risk management analytics software to asset managers and asset owners. In its sustainability and climate segment, MSCI provides ESG data to the investment industry. In private assets, MSCI provides real restate reporting, market data, benchmarking, and analytics to investors and real estate managers.

Workday is a software company that offers human capital management, financial management, and business planning solutions for enterprises. Known for being a cloud-only software provider, Workday was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.

East Money Information Co Ltd is engaged in securities business, financial e-commerce service business, financial data service business, and Internet advertising service business. It mainly provides paid financial data services, financial e-commerce services, and Internet advertisement services through its Website, eastmoney.com. It generates majority of ots revenue from the securities business.

Rocket Companies is a financial services company that was originally founded as Rock Financial in 1985 and is currently based in Detroit. Rocket Companies offers a wide array of services and products but is best known for its Rocket Mortgage business. The company’s mortgage lending operations are split between its direct-to-consumer lending, which sees borrowers accessing the company’s lending arm directly through either its mobile app or website, and its partner network where mortgage brokers and other firms use Rocket’s origination process to offer loans to their customers. The company has rapidly gained market share in recent years and will also be the largest mortgage servicer in the US following its acquisition of the Mr. Cooper Group.

Founded in 1973, Cboe controls the largest option exchange in the US, which provides around 60% of the firm's revenue. The company is best known for its proprietary S&P 500 and VIX index options, which it offers through an exclusive contract with S&P Global. The firm moved into US and European equities through the $3.4 billion acquisition of BATS in 2017. Cboe has continued to look to expand internationally, using acquisitions to build a presence in both Canada and Australia.

Experian is one of the leading credit bureaus in North America and the United Kingdom, providing the consumer information that is the basis for making lending decisions. The company also provides decision analytics, marketing data, and direct-to-consumer credit products and services. Roughly one quarter of the company's revenue is generated outside of North America and the United Kingdom, primarily in Latin America and Asia.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is the leading cryptocurrency exchange platform in the United States. The company intends to be the safe and regulation-compliant point of entry for retail investors and institutions into the cryptocurrency economy. Users can establish an account directly with the firm, instead of using an intermediary, and many choose to allow Coinbase to act as a custodian for their cryptocurrency, giving the company breadth beyond that of a traditional financial exchange. While the company still generates the majority of its revenue from transaction fees charged to its retail customers, Coinbase uses internal investment and acquisitions to expand into adjacent businesses, such as prime brokerage and data analytics.

Interactive Brokers is a large, automated retail and institutional brokerage that boasted nearly $780 billion in customer equity at the end of 2025. The company cut its teeth as a market maker, introducing US financial markets to automated and algorithmic training before expanding into brokerage services in 1993. The firm has a wide-ranging client base, with its best-in-class order execution and extremely low margin lending rates catering to a sophisticated audience of hedge funds, proprietary traders, and introducing brokers that account for about 45% of the firm’s commissions. With operations spanning more than 170 electronic exchanges, 40 countries, and 29 currencies, Interactive Brokers caters to a global clientele, with more than 80% of active accounts sitting outside the US.

Fiserv is a financial technology company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that provides account processing, digital banking, card issuing and merchant acquiring services to banks, credit unions and businesses. Founded in 1984, it built its core banking business through acquisitions such as Information Technology Inc. of Lincoln, Nebraska in 1995, which brought the Premier account-processing platform. Fiserv processes debit and credit card transactions, loyalty programmes, loans, electronic bill payments, ACH and wire transfers, check deposits and ATM transactions on behalf of financial institutions, with a long-standing base among small and midsize US banks. Its 2019 acquisition of First Data for $22 billion added a large merchant-acquiring business, including the Clover point-of-sale platform for small businesses and the Carat payments platform for large enterprises. The company earns recurring processing and transaction fees, software and service fees and hardware sales. In 2025 it reported revenue of $19.8 billion, operating income of $4.38 billion and about 38,000 employees, and roughly 85% of 2024 revenue came from the US and Canada. Takis Georgakopoulos became chief executive in 2025 after Frank Bisignano left to run the US Social Security Administration, and in November 2025 the shares moved from the NYSE to Nasdaq under the ticker FISV.

Adyen is a payment company that provides merchants with a single platform to accept e-commerce, mobile, and point-of-sale payments in multiple countries using various payment schemes and methodologies. Adyen started out providing only gateway and payment processing services to merchants but soon expanded into merchant acquiring services as well. Adyen obtained a banking license to improve settlement of merchant accounts.

China International Capital Corporation, known as CICC, is a Beijing-based investment banking and financial services group established in 1995. Its activities include investment banking, equity sales and trading, fixed income, currency and commodities services, investment management and wealth management. The company provides financial advice and capital markets services to businesses and institutions, while its wealth management operations also serve individual investors. Its investment banking activities support securities offerings, corporate transactions and access to domestic and international capital markets. Investment management services and research capabilities complement its securities and advisory businesses. CICC earns revenue through financial services, securities activities and the management of client investments rather than manufacturing or selling physical products. The company converted into a joint stock company in June 2015 and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in November of that year.

Corpay is a publicly listed corporate-payments company founded in 1998 and headquartered in the Atlanta metropolitan area. It provides vehicle payments, fuel cards, lodging payments, accounts-payable tools and cross-border payment services to companies and public-sector customers. Businesses use its networks and software to control employee and fleet spending, make supplier payments and manage foreign-exchange exposure. Corpay earns transaction, processing, spread and service revenue across these products. The company was formerly known as FLEETCOR Technologies and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under CPAY. In February 2025 it announced the acquisition of Brazilian driver-payments application Gringo and later reported acquiring all of the company for approximately USD 153.7 million net of cash. Corpay funded the purchase through its controlled Brazilian vehicle-payments structure and reports Gringo in the Vehicle Payments segment.

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in New York City, Tradeweb Markets is a leading fixed-income trading platform. While it does offer electronic processing for some voice-negotiated trades, the company focuses primarily on providing electronic trading networks that connect broker/dealers, institutional clients, and retail customers. While the company offers trading in a wide variety of products, the bulk of its business is in US and European government debt, mortgage-backed securities, interest-rate swaps, and US and international corporate bonds. The firm also sells fixed-income trading and price data, primarily through a deal with Refinitiv’s Eikon service.

Verisk is a leading data, analytics, and technology provider for property-casualty insurers. Verisk traces its history to Insurance Services Office, a nonprofit advisory organization founded in 1971 by US P&C insurers. ISO was formed as an association of insurance companies to assist with a variety of insurance use cases, such as reporting to regulators, defining policies, and determining independent premium rates. As the firm expanded its use cases, it became a for-profit company, renamed Verisk, and went public in 2009.Verisk’s single segment (insurance) provides underwriting solutions, including forms, rules, loss costs, and catastrophe modeling. For claims, Verisk’s solutions include property repair estimates and antifraud tools. About 83% of Verisk’s revenue is US-based.

Global Payments is a leading provider of payment processing and software solutions and focuses on serving small and midsize merchants. The company operates in 30 countries and generates about one fourth of its revenue from outside North America, primarily in Europe and Asia. In 2019, Global Payments merged with Total System Services in an all-stock deal that gave Total System Services shareholders 48% of the combined company’s shares. The merger added issuer processing operations.

Synchrony Financial, originally a spinoff of GE Capital's retail financing business, is the largest provider of private-label credit cards in the United States by both outstanding receivables and purchasing volume. Synchrony partners with other firms to market its credit products in their physical stores as well as on their websites and mobile applications. Synchrony operates through three segments: retail card (private-label and co-branded general-purpose credit cards), payment solutions (promotional financing for large ticket purchases), and CareCredit (financing for elective healthcare procedures).

Founded in 2012, Affirm is a market leader in the buy now, pay later space with around $36 billion in transaction volume in fiscal 2025. Affirm offers both zero-interest financing, which is merchant-subsidized, and interest-bearing loans, which function as personal loans that are approved on a per-transaction basis. Over 70% of Affirm’s transaction volume comes from its interest-bearing loans, which also constitute the majority of its revenue. Affirm primarily operates in the United States, which accounted for more than 95% of its revenue in 2025, but it has also expanded to Canada and the United Kingdom.

LPL Financial is the largest US independent broker-dealer, with more than 32,000 financial advisors affiliated with its platform and roughly 11 million customer accounts at the end of 2025. The firm earns the bulk of its profit from interest income earned on client cash balances and from advisory fees and commissions tied to the $2.4 trillion in assets under management or advisory on its platform at year-end 2025. LPL specializes in the provision of turnkey wealth management services for affiliated independent advisors, but maintains a diverse array of affiliation modalities, running the gamut from more traditional employee models to a pure RIA custody approach. It earns tuck-in revenue from recordkeeping fees and the provision of software tools and services to its advisor base.

Hithink RoyalFlush Information Network Co Ltd is engaged in providing Internet financial information services and online financial software. The company's business includes an online market trading system, mobile financial information service, fund sales, financial big data processing, and cloud services. It serves individuals, brokers, funds, private placements, banks, insurance, government, and research Institutional clients.

Wolters Kluwer is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services in health; tax and accounting; environmental, social, and governance; finance; compliance; and legal. More than 60% of revenue is generated in North America and around 30% is from Europe.

Along with Experian and TransUnion, Equifax is one of the leading credit bureaus in the United States. Equifax’s credit reports provide credit histories on millions of consumers, and the firm's services are critical to lenders’ credit decisions. In addition, about 40% of the firm’s revenue comes from Workforce Solutions, which provides income verification and employer human resources services. Equifax generates about 25% of its revenue from outside the United States.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, which was spun off from Automatic Data Processing in 2007, is a leading provider of investor communication and technology-driven solutions to banks, broker/dealers, traditional and alternative-asset managers, wealth managers, and corporate issuers. Broadridge is composed of two operating segments: investor communication solutions and global technology and operations.

SoFi is a financial services company that was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco. Initially known for its student loan refinancing business, the company has expanded its product offerings to include personal loans, credit cards, mortgages, investment accounts, banking services, and financial planning. The company intends to be a one-stop shop for its clients' finances and operates solely through its mobile app and website. Through its acquisition of Galileo in 2020, the company also offers payment and account services for debit cards and digital banking.

Toast Inc is a cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform purpose-built for the restaurant community. The company provides a comprehensive platform of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and financial technology solutions, including integrated payment processing, restaurant-grade hardware, and a broad ecosystem of third-party partners. It serves as a restaurant operating system, connecting front of house and back of house operations across service models such as dine-in, takeout, and delivery. It operates through one reportable segment consisting of its SaaS products, financial technology solutions, integrated payments, hardware, and partner ecosystem.