Mastercard 'Dreamonomics' report: 68% of SME owners favour stability over speed

Mastercard has published what it describes as an inaugural "Dreamonomics" report examining how small and medium-sized business owners are approaching growth, releasing the findings on or around 15 September 2026. The report positions its findings around what Mastercard calls redefining growth "for a more demanding economy," with three headline statistics framing the study's conclusions.

Stability Ahead of Speed

The most prominent finding is that 68% of survey respondents said they prioritise stability over speed — a framing that, taken at face value, suggests a meaningful share of SME owners are tempering ambition with caution rather than chasing rapid expansion. Mastercard has not, in its verified press materials, used the phrase "stability and predictability" — the verified language is stability over speed, and that distinction matters for how the finding should be interpreted.

The second headline figure is that 89% of respondents said they want access to more digital tools. That proportion, if representative, points to persistent demand for technology-enabled services among smaller businesses — and suggests that, whatever appetite for stability may exist, it does not translate into resistance to digital adoption.

Nearly nine in ten small and medium-sized business owners surveyed said they want more digital tools, according to Mastercard's inaugural Dreamonomics report — even as a majority said stability takes precedence over speed.

Cyber Protection Rises Up the Agenda

The third data point — that 71% of respondents identified cyber protection as a priority — is notable in its own right. There is a long-standing assumption in the industry that cyber threats are primarily a large-enterprise concern, and that smaller businesses are either underserved by vendors or regarded as lower-value targets. Whether or not that assumption has ever been well-founded, the Dreamonomics data appears to challenge it directly: nearly three-quarters of the SME owners surveyed placed cyber protection among their priorities, a share that sits in the same range as the appetite for digital tools.

The co-existence of these two figures — high demand for digital adoption alongside high concern for cyber protection — may reflect a coherent underlying logic: SME owners who want more digital capability are also aware of the exposure that comes with it.

What the Report Does and Does Not Confirm

The Dreamonomics report is described by Mastercard as inaugural, implying the company intends it to become a recurring piece of research. The full report is available via Mastercard's newsroom and as a dedicated PDF on mastercard.com. The investor relations press release, published through Business Wire, provides the primary source for the three verified headline figures.

Several details that have circulated in secondary coverage of the report cannot be confirmed from Mastercard's verified press materials as reviewed for this article. These include: the total number of businesses surveyed, the number of countries covered by the fieldwork, any country-level or regional breakdown of results (including any Europe-specific data), the identity of any research partner, and any additional statistics beyond the three figures in the press release headline. Readers and analysts who wish to assess the report's methodology and sample design should consult the full PDF directly.

No executive quotes from the press release have been independently verified for this article, and no executive titles at Mastercard have been confirmed from accessible source material.

Why It Matters

For the payments and embedded-finance sector, the Dreamonomics findings — taken at verified face value — carry practical implications. An SME segment that overwhelmingly wants more digital tools but simultaneously places a high premium on stability over speed is one that may respond better to incremental, reliability-focused product rollouts than to feature-heavy or disruptive propositions. The cyber-protection figure adds a further dimension: demand for security is not a peripheral concern among this audience but a mainstream one, sitting alongside digital adoption rather than in tension with it. Providers building or repositioning SME-focused payments and financial-services products have, in this data, a set of stated owner priorities against which their offerings can be tested.