Mastercard has introduced the global digital Masterpass solution, which allows consumers to pay online, through mobile apps or in brick-and-mortar stores. Currently available at hundreds of thousands of merchants online or in-app, Masterpass contactless payments will soon expand to more than five million physical locations in 77 countries, with 1.8 million merchant locations in the U.S. alone.
“Easy and intuitive payment methods have become table stakes,” said Craig Vosburg, President of North America Mastercard at an event introducing the new service on July 14. “We’ve evolved our network to enable connections, security, ubiquity and interoperability. We want to enable our customers to pay anywhere, anytime, any way they want.”
Online merchants currently accepting Masterpass include Office Depot, Firehouse Subs, MLB.com and ParkMobile. BJ’s Wholesale Club is already set up to accept contactless payments, and merchants set to deploy Masterpass in the coming months include JetBlue, Saks.com, LordandTaylor.com, and the apps for both Subway and The Cheesecake Factory.
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The U.S. rollout of Masterpass will begin later in July and will first be available to Android device owners. Mastercard is working primarily through issuing banks, which already have made strong inroads onto consumers’ devices via mobile banking apps. More than 80 million accounts will automatically be enabled through issuing partner banks as the service rolls out globally. Europe and the Middle East/Africa will be live by the end of 2016, while additional rollouts in other regions (Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia Pacific) will continue into 2017.
Masterpass allows issuers to design and develop their own branded digital payment solutions using Masterpass APIs and SDKs (Software Development Kits), while merchants can use these tools to enable checkout online and within their mobile apps.
Mastercard Reveals New Branding
The Masterpass announcement was accompanied by the unveiling of Mastercard’s new brand identity. While the brand’s logo retains the familiar red and yellow colors and overlapping circles, the “c” in Mastercard is now lower-case. The card itself, while still very much in use, is not as important an element to the brand as it was in the past, according to Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Mastercard.
“Mastercard is one of those unique brands that is instantly recognizable around the world,” said Rajamannar in a statement. “To thrive in this new digital world where business moves faster than ever, we want to modernize and elevate the brand in a design that is simple and elegant, yet unquestionably Mastercard.”