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Mobile payments from MasterPass are heading to an app near you

Lucy | March 3, 2014

The MasterCard service is now going to add in-application purchases to its offerings.

MasterCard has just announced that its MasterPass mobile payments wallet will be available for making in-app purchases as well as the already existent option for merchants to embed the transaction type into their e- and mcommerce websites.

This announcement was made by the credit card giant in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

Among the very first to use this new in-app mobile payments opportunity from MasterCard are Major League Baseball and Starbucks Australia. By bringing the smartphone wallet to applications, the company is acknowledging that consumers are shopping with their favorite retailers through branded retail apps on an increasing basis. This is the case whether those shoppers are on the go or actually within the store, itself.

As MasterCard recognized this trend, it only made sense to ensure that its mobile payments were compatible with it.

The senior vice president and group head, U.S. emerging payments lead at MasterCard, Purchase, New York, Mario Shiliashki, explained that as a growing number of consumers shop at retailer locations by way of mobile apps or with applications and browsers combined, it has been very important for the company’s offerings to adapt. He added that it is common for smartphone using consumers to find the experience from a dedicated app to be more appealing. Mobile Pyaments - MasterCard

Therefore, by allowing MasterPass transactions to be available in stores, on websites, and in apps, Shiliashki feels that it will help to enhance the complete shopping experience. Providing compatibility with its mobile wallet in applications means that consumers will be able to choose the experience that they feel is the most appealing, relevant, and appropriate for their own needs. He also stated that it has allowed the company to bring the online and in store experience closer together.

The appeal for consumers to choose mobile payments through MasterPass instead of paying with credit cards and other means through each individual retail application is that it allows a transaction to be securely completed from one wallet, without having to provide payment data with numerous different merchant application providers.

Mobile payments market cleanup attempt to be made by industry giants

Rebecca | February 10, 2014

Two major players in smartphone transactions have teamed up to boost the market – MasterCard and Weve.

Mobile Commerce - MasterCard Partnership MasterCard and Weve have now come together in a partnership that is designed to help the mobile payments market to clean itself up, smooth itself out and become considerably more appealing to merchants and consumers alike.

The scattered and inconsistent nature of the market is a major factor that is holding back the adoption of the tech.

This new mobile payments partnership is made up of credit card giant, MasterCard, and Weve, which is a joint venture comprising of the three largest mobile operators in the United Kingdom: O2, Vodafone UK, and EE. They will be working together to develop something altogether new and that will hopefully do what the market has failed to be able to provide until now.

They have described their goal of creating the U.K.’s “most comprehensive contactless mobile payments system.”

This is meant to help to create a contactless system for paying for products and services through the use of their smartphones and mobile devices, in a way that will be simple and convenient for consumers to use, while being cheaper to manage for banks. The role that MasterCard has taken on is to provide the system with the integration services and the technology to make it possible for financial institutions such as banks to be able to step into the payment platform from Weve.

Weve’s CEO, David Sear, said that this contactless transaction technology in the form of credit and debit cards has been taking off in the United Kingdom. He explained that there are currently 36 million people in the U.K. who are using this type of card, and that more than 300,000 retailers there are able to process this type of transaction.

Equally, he admits that paying over mobile devices using similar technology is “a bit of a mess”. He stated that it “may sound harsh, but it’s inescapably true; to date, the industry has created a level of discussion and confusion driven by a multitude of announcements that actually haven’t delivered mobile payments systems that works the way that consumers want and need them to.”