Mastercard is dramatically expanding its Masterpass digital payment service.
It’s sort of like PayPal with a much stronger mobile device focus. Card issuing financial services institutions are able to enable Masterpass payments themselves using their own custom branding within their own mobile apps. Meanwhile, merchants can enable Masterpass payments by incorporating a Masterpass payment button in their apps—much like how online merchants have traditionally integrated PayPal support.
In a statement announcing the platform’s expansion, Mastercard said that card issuers in the US will start rolling out their solutions later this month, with plans to bring the platform to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa by the end of the year; APAC expansion will continue in 2017. A number of American banks have already committed to supporting the service, including Ally Bank, Bank of America, Capital One, and more. Meanwhile, Mastercard says that the service is already “currently available at hundreds of thousand of merchants online or in-app”, with consumers now “able to use Masterpass at the more than five million merchant locations in 77 countries that accept contactless payments”.
The expansion of Masterpass is yet another indication of the growing excitement over mobile payments, with Microsoft having recently announced its own mPayment platform to rival the big names like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. And with Mastercard calling Masterpass “the foundation for the future of commerce”, the financial services giant clearly has great ambitions for its own offering.
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