Invites mobile developers to embed payment tech in apps and sites.
The New York Times reports that having experimented with building its own apps for money transfers and alerts, MasterCard wants to see how third parties can push on the online/mobile payments habit.
Before, if developers wanted to use its payment technology, they have had to get a merchant agreement, set up the payment system and make the consumer enter data each time. The opening up of the system will remove these barriers, and enable payment features in all manner of apps from games to social media products.
So far, MasterCard has identified about 20 of its services that developers will be able to use in their applications. They include payment technology, bill payment systems and data streams like consumer spending patterns, which could be used to send coupons.
“A big part of the strategy is to be able to harness the innovation of others in the developer community to really push our business forward,” said Josh Peirez, MasterCard’s chief innovation officer.
“You’re seeing quite different ways people are paying for digital goods, but you haven’t really seen that translate into physical goods,” he said. “It’s still really hard to buy a physical item from your phone.”
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Without doubt, there's a rush of interest from high street payments giants in mobile now. Visa recently announced an NFC 'jacket' for iPhone while Barclaycard has worked on high-profile contactless mobile campaigns with Nokia and O2, and more recently Orange.
