Mastercard tackles faster payments in the UK, smart watches and open banking
This week has been a busy one for Mastercard, with several announcements and tie-ups with companies in the areas of payments, open banking and smart watches.
One of these firms is challenger bank Starling, which will help Mastercard settle funds sent within the UK through its Mastercard Send service.
Banks and other businesses will be able to send and receive real-time P2P and corporate disbursement payments to UK bank accounts through the domestic Faster Payments scheme, supported by Starling Bank, says Mastercard.
Mastercard Send uses the payment rails of VocaLink (acquired by Mastercard last year) and focuses on services for companies that make regular disbursements.
Income Group will the first user of this new service in the UK, which specialises in payroll services for corporations.
“Existing direct-to-bank-account solutions are often batch-based and hence less timely, giving businesses a real headache when it comes to disbursements of funds,” says Mark Barnett, divisional president of Mastercard in the UK.
The new Montblanc strap
Pay smart
Elsewhere, Mastercard has collaborated with rival Visa and NXP to launch its new mWallet 2GO, a white-label wallet service developed on the NXP Secure Service 2GO Platform.
The aim of this platform is offer the mobile wallet development in one solution including hardware, surrounding software and ecosystem integration.
The payment solution is designed to ease development, reduce cost, and accelerate time-to-market to add mobile payment capability to any device.
Montblanc, a German manufacturer of luxury accessories, will be the first to launch it own mobile wallet solution based on mWallet 2GO for its new TWIN smart strap.
“In this new stylish, smart strap, we’ve combined high-end materials with the most advanced technologies on the market to bring our customers easy, secure payment capabilities for their watches,” says Dr Felix Obschonka, director for new technologies at Montblanc.
The open banking utopia is almost here
Mastercard is also developing a new suite of services to address and support the changes happening as a result of Europe’s PSD2 and open banking legislation, aiming to make it easier for banks and third party providers to work together.
The launch is set for early 2019, with the UK and Poland as a priority.
The new offering will incorporate a pan-European directory of third party providers to help banks to ensure that parties seeking access to a customer’s account are legitimate.
The new services will also include a fraud monitoring service and a dedicated dispute resolution mechanism to help handle disputes in the payment card industry.
Additionally, the suite will also feature a connectivity hub that will help third parties establish and maintain communication with banks.
“Third parties need to be able to access the data and infrastructure controlled by banks, and at the same time banks need confidence that the third parties requesting account access are legitimate,” says Jason Lane, EVP, market development Europe at Mastercard.
“We are working on improving end user experiences in the open banking environment, relating to both payments and information access and look forward to rolling those out as the services and ecosystem, evolves,” he adds.
