How Mastercard Is Reshaping the Future of Commerce

There are some things money can’t buy. 2.5 billion customer accounts and a global presence in 210 countries are a couple of these things.

Over the past 50 years, Mastercard has built one of the most trusted, respected, and widely-used payment solutions companies in the world.

Part of how Mastercard came to manage annual purchase volumes that exceed $653 billion in the United States alone is its unwavering commitment to providing consumers with priceless, innovative experiences that they couldn’t have otherwise.   In 1983, for example, Mastercard became the credit card company to introduce laser holograms on cards in an effort to thwart fraud and create a safer shopping experience for consumers.

These days, according to Karen Pascoe, Mastercard’s Senior Vice President of User Experience, whether it’s using a desktop computer, an Apple Watch, or a mobile device, consumers don’t want to have to deal with digital payments. They just want to enable their lives as they go about living it, using seamless technologies that allow for increased control and outstanding security measures that enable consumers to shop with confidence.  

That’s why Karen believes that every device can and likely will be a commerce device; that plastic cards will start to become a thing of the past as accounts will be intertwined with fitness bands, payment rings, connected refrigerators, connected homes, connected cars, etc.

Wanting to take a deeper look into how Mastercard is revolutionizing commerce for the digital age, I recently traveled to Mastercard’s tech hub in the middle of Manhattan to meet with Karen on the latest edition of the Oracle-sponsored CX Factor*.

Below are some of the most intriguing and revealing points from our meeting.

As a technological innovation, enhanced security, and consumer convenience all continue to become crucial aspects of business operations, Mastercard sets a shining example for all e-commerce businesses to aspire to.

Listen to Your Customer Above All Else

“From a product experience [standpoint], the work where we really intensively double and triple down is on usability. . . For digital product experiences, you really need to get consumer feedback, get that product better, [and] refine it. That’s really what the digital world-leading practices are.”

To meet the needs of connected consumers, in an age of unprecedented technological innovation and flow of information, Mastercard has built a usability lab in New York City where they bring in consumers to help collaborate and design the overall product experience for the company. It is in this location that the co-creation process undergoes constant iteration, prototyping, and testing to ensure that Mastercard is delivering the highest quality consumer experiences possible.

As Karen puts is, “It’s really getting under the hood, really understanding what motivates and drives that consumer, and taking any bit of friction out of that process.”

A prime example of this process is Mastercard’s Masterpass program. The smartphone payment method evolved out of the PayPass program, which allowed consumers to tap their card on digital readers. Knowing that consumers were more interested in mobile payment solutions, as indicated by its research, the company began working to develop a technology more in-line with the desires of its customers.

Make Security the Number One Concern

“Security and safety is critically important for us in the digital world. So every time a consumer transacts, you really need to answer three questions. ‘Who are you are you? Are you in fact, you? And what can you do?’”

Security is of the utmost importance when dealing with people’s finances and personal information. Time and time again, companies have fallen victim to malicious hackers who steal customer information, damaging companies in irreparable ways.

Mastercard takes security extremely seriously as one of its core capabilities is managing customer identities.

To ensure client safety, the three aforementioned questions must be answered.

The first question, “Who are you?", is something that the banks do when an account is first set up.

The third question, “What can you do?”, refers to how much money an individual can spend, a person’s behavioral shopping patterns which help identify fraud, etc.

The second question, however, is one that is quite complicated in the digital age. To verify the “Are you in fact you?”, answer, Mastercard employs biometrics, advanced analytics, and secure capabilities like tokenization in an effort to narrow account credentials to a particular device, merchant, and transaction, which ensures consumer protection.

Additionally, Mastercard has applied biometric verifications such as fingerprints to reduce instances of fraud. The company also utilizes retinal scanning technology called Selfie Pay, which has the consumer blink into an application that compares a stored image of their retina to the selfie; the blink is used as proof of life.

Behind all of this innovation is the cloud, which enables Mastercard to continually reach new levels of convenience for consumers, coupled with high-level security features.

Hand Consumers the Controls

“The more control we can give you in terms of what your goals are financially . . . It’s just really allowing the consumer to take control of their finances and commerce and how commerce really plays. . . All of our research clearly lets us know [that] consumers really want financial control.”

Mastercard intimately understands that consumers are the “star of the show”; not their brand.

This means that the company aims to give consumers as much free-reign and control over their finances as they wish.

Programs like its Mastercard in Control effectively place consumers in the driver’s seat as far as their finances are concerned. This service allows users to effectively manage their spending with various real-time alerts, supplies virtual card numbers to give to a customer’s child when they go shopping, and other features that let clients control how, where, when, and by whom their money is spent.

Envision the future Through Consumers’ Eyes

“We need to follow consumers where they are. Consumers are in apps, consumers are in stores, consumers are online, but we’re also seeing the capability for portable devices to allow consumers even more convenience; for instance, fitness bands, payment rings, and car key fobs. It’s really only one step further to be able to do a secure cloud-based transaction.

An important way Mastercard has maintained its extreme relevance is by closely partnering with cloud-based services providers, companies in Silicon Valley and consumer electronics manufacturers to drive how payments will be embedded, enabled, and managed in the Internet of Things.

As an example, though account access will be enabled through a myriad of devices, the cloud’s capabilities ensure consumer information remains secure in multi-brand, multi-channel and multilingual environments.  

Mastercard is delivering an array of subtle yet powerful customer experiences across their organization and the world. They’ve done an incredible job of constantly staying ahead of the financial curve, and of anticipating consumer needs before the users themselves are aware of what’s coming next. This will no doubt keep Mastercard at the top of the payment services list for a long, long time. And that is priceless.

*Oracle is a client of Mark Fidelman