Mastercard Combines Cards and Digital Wallets for Easy Payments

Mastercard launched a new service that allows cardholders to use digital wallets to pay for purchases at millions of merchants in Asia Pacific. 

Mastercard announced the launch of Pay Local in Asia Pacific, a service that allows travelers and locals to link their credit and debit cards to local digital wallets for convenient and secure payments.

Partners for the service include the region’s leading digital wallet providers: 

• DANA in Indonesia; 
• Touch ’n Go in Malaysia; 
• Bakong in Cambodia; 
• LankaPay in Sri Lanka, etc. 

Mastercard’s Pay Local will be available at more than 35 million merchants in the region that accept these wallets. The service also targets other regions where digital wallets are widely used for everyday purchases, including Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The press release notes that Pay Local is an extension of Mastercard’s existing partnerships with leading wallet providers, which include partnerships with Alipay and Weixin Pay in mainland China, as well as Octopus in Hong Kong, Maya in the Philippines, ShopBack in Singapore, TrueMoney in Thailand, and GrabPay across Southeast Asia.

Mastercard representatives highlight the benefits of Pay Local for consumers and businesses: 

• travelers get a convenient way to pay for goods and services while traveling, regardless of where in the world their Mastercard card was issued; 
• local residents will be able to pay micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) that don’t accept traditional card payments;
• MSMEs will be able to expand their payment processing capabilities with minimal infrastructure investment;
• wallet operators will be able to expand their customer base, and card issuers will be able to offer more payment acceptance points to their customers.

During a recent earnings call for analysts of major financial institutions, it became known that about 70% of all personal transactions in the Mastercard network are contactless payments.