Last week, Mastercard organized REACH –Acceptance Summit 2019, a one of its kind platform that aims to bring together industry stakeholders to chalk out a roadmap to make India the largest digital payments acceptance destination in the world. The event witnessed exciting talks and panel discussions with senior executives from Mastercard, leading banks like SBI, RBL Bank, Yes Bank and Axis Bank; and leading fintech players.
Acknowledging the importance of merchants in the digital economy, Mastercard committed to empower 10 million merchants across India with digital payments acceptance capabilities by 2020. Speaking at a session on Secure & Seamless commerce in a Connected World, Gautam Pande, director, Market Product Management, South Asia, Mastercard said, “Today, about 25 percent digital transactions are lost due to technical issues such as redirects, mobile optimization and SMS delivery failure etc. When you optimize all digital payment scenarios, you unlock digital commerce everywhere, giving consumers the security, convenience and control they demand every way they want to pay.”
To make safety, convenience and control a part of every payment transaction, Mastercard provides several advanced tools and technology. For instance, Mastercard Identity Check is an authentication solution that enables real-time consumer authentication on billions of digital transactions each year around the globe. It eliminates unnecessary friction during transaction, reduces online shopping cart abandonment, and improves the overall shopping experience for consumers.
Recently, the Reserve Bank of India gave a nod to tokenization for debit, credit, and prepaid card transactions as a part of its continuous endeavour to enhance the safety and security of the payment systems in the country. Tokenization is a process to assign unique token to masks sensitive card details during a transaction. Considering the importance of tokenization for a safe and secure digital payments ecosystem, Mastercard has developed Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES), a secure platform to enable consumers to use their cards when, where and how they want. In other words, MDES helps transform any connected device into a commerce device to make and receive payments, while ensuring the highest level of security through tokenization. Elaborating upon the benefits of tokenization, Harveer Singh, director, Market Product Management, South Asia, Mastercard said, “Mastercard tokens provide issuers with additional visibility for fraud scoring to increase transaction approval rates. Moreover, in case a card is reissued by the issuer, tokenization keeps Card-on-file payments unaffected. By bringing together the convenience, safety and security, tokenization will help smartphones and other connected device become the de-facto mode of payments in the future.”
Wrapping up the session, Gautam and Harveer stated that any security strategy is only as strong as its weakest link. Therefore, Mastercard continuously makes safety and security inherent to the product development process.
