Mastercard tier most of their products into - in Europe at least - typically four categories, from lowest to highest
- Standard
- Premium
- World
- World Elite
Our UK personal cards started as standard Debit Mastercards, and we’ve since upgraded them to the World Debit tier. Our business cards are “World Business Premium Debit Mastercard” and, yes, I’m as confused as you are about where that fits on that list.
There is a trade-off on each of these tiers: Mastercard require the issuer to include more features, and in exchange the issuer gets higher interchange (on business cards in general, and also consumer cards outside the EEA). The higher the tier, the more features required; this especially goes for World Elite, and also more so for credit cards than debit cards. The feature set required for a given tier isn’t fixed - issuers get to pick and choose which they want to implement in order to meet the bar.
But what does this mean for you as a customer of ours? Not an awful lot! It only indirectly impacts the product that you experience, in that internally we have notes next to certain product features saying “This is a part of why our cards are now World Debit”. Several of these features are ones we offered anyway. For example, earlier someone said:
I believe cheaper exchange rates
This isn’t really true - Mastercard gives everyone the same exchange rate (though a bank can choose to perform their own FX, or add their own markup on top of it). At the same time, you will often see a better exchange rate on higher tiered cards because its one feature you can use to count towards that tier.
There is a correlation between higher tiers and travel features - such as airport lounge access. I mean, the clue’s in the names - “World” and “World Elite”
Note that things are somewhat different outside Europe, and especially in the US the tiers are a bit more differentiated. A credit card transaction in the US can sometimes attract 3% interchange - as opposed to 0.3% here - so there’s more room for differentiation.
Pragmatically though, unless you’re a card nerd, just ignore the back-of-card label and just compare accounts/cards based upon their advertised features.