Fast on the heels of Visa's enhanced partnership with PayPal, Mastercard announced its acquisition of UK-based VocaLink, a real-time payments platform. The move expands Mastercard's ecosystem beyond traditional card-based payments into market space occupied by the likes of PayPal and its Venmo direct payments platform. Mastercard points out that ACH-based transfers represent 50% of payments [...]
In a landmark ruling, the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal determined that Mastercard did not follow regulations in setting interchange rates and must pay £68.5 million in damages to supermarket chain J Sainsbury. Mastercard issued a statement indicating it expects to take a total charge of £90-100 million after interest and other costs related to the dispute are [...]
Mastercard is updating its brand identity with an updated logo and a change in the way the corporate name is represented: the capital "C" is gone and in some cases, so is the capital "M". (It will be interesting to see how long it will take for all of the spell/grammar check programs to catch [...]
In May, I published an article "Are Americans too dumb for Credit Card PINs?" pointing out the absurdity of U.S. card network rules requiring a merchant to accept a cardholder signature as authentication on an EMV-chip enabled card transaction, rather than requiring the customer to enter a PIN like 80+ other countries. By forcing merchants to [...]
MasterCard will invest up to $800 million in the India payments market by 2020, on top of $400 already invested since 2014. The opportunity is massive: less than 5% of payments in India are digital. Investments will include improved MasterCard acceptance by smaller, independent businesses which make up 45% of India's GDP; and mobile technology, [...]
After more than ten years of lobbying by MasterCard, Visa and others, China issued new regulations on June 7 which will allow foreign payment networks access to China's $8+ trillion payments market, previously dominated by a near-monopoly of China Union Pay, which is government-run. Card issuers will still be required to operate locally, and China's [...]
MasterCard reported an impressive 27% year-over-year reduction in counterfeit card fraud at EMV chip-enabled merchants. That doesn't mean merchants are seeing the benefits of those reductions. In May, I blogged about the sharp rise in chargebacks that merchants are experiencing due to the liability shift that occurred last October, whereby merchants can be charged back without [...]
MasterCard announced a new platform to help small to medium sized online businesses combat fraud. The platform is called Simplify Controls and it provides the ability for merchants to set their own risk tolerances including transaction amount limit, geo-location of the buyer, and multiple sales. It also incorporates Kount's fraud monitoring engine which analyzes hundreds of [...]
MasterCard announced a pilot with Pizza Hut and SoftBank Robotics to deploy humanoid-type robots to take orders and process payments at some Pizza Hut locations in Asia. The robots have a low price point of about $1600 and can react to emotion cues from humans. I wonder if it will be eligible for minimum wage? [...]
The tide is turning on the time-honored process of presenting a payment card at the point of sale. MasterCard predicts that 38% of EU payment transactions by 2020 will be digital, meaning they originated on a tokenized device such as a mobile phone or wearable rather than the presentment of a payment card. MasterCard's MDES platform also [...]
