A rise in card use helped MasterCard Inc. post a 21 percent increase in first-quarter profits, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The company reported that its revenues climbed 17 percent to $1.76 billion, beating analysts’ expectations.

The results were “driven by an increase in processed transactions” and represented the highest quarterly growth rate since MasterCard’s initial public offering in 2006, Ajay Banga, president and CEO of MasterCard, said in a statement today.

MasterCard and its bigger rival, Visa Inc., operate payments networks that help facilitate credit and debit card transactions for banks. They don’t lend to consumers but provide services to banks that issue their cards and those that perform processing for merchants.

The companies have continued to perform well this year, despite U.S. regulations that affect debit-card processing and concerns over softening in foreign markets, thanks in large part to consumers’ ongoing shift to electronic payments from cash and checks.

But as growth prospects in the U.S. market begin to shrink due to the saturation of card payments, MasterCard and Visa have been bulking up their efforts to expand in emerging and underdeveloped countries where the use of plastic is small or non-existent.