MasterCard announced a partnership with Everything Everywhere, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, to develop leading mobile and digital payment solutions for Everything Everywhere’s customers. Everything Everywhere is a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom. The company operates the under the Orange and T-Mobile brands and has currently around 27 million customers in the UK.

Over the course of the partnership, MasterCard and Everything Everywhere want to introduce new payment solutions and accelerate the adoption of mobile payments. One of the first products to launch will be a NFC-based mobile payment services that allows Everything Everywhere’s customers to make contactless payments at more than 100,000 retailers in the UK.

MasterCard and Everything Everywhere have already worked together to provide the Orange QuickTap service, a NFC-payment service in the UK. MasterCard is continuing to focus on mobile payments, just recently the credit card giant signed a deal with Deutsche Telekom for mobile payments in Germany.

Today, MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom announced a strategic partnership to bring NFC-based mobile payment services to Deutsche Telekom’s 93 million mobile subscribers in Europe. The first product to launch is a mobile wallet app called MyWallet for customers of Deutsche Telekom in Poland this summer. The digital wallet will support various local banks and financial institutions and enable customers to pay contactless at every retail store where MasterCard PayPass is accepted. In Germany Deutsche Telekom will first trial mobile payment with mobile phone tags and NFC-enabled credit cards in order to prepare for the launch of MyWallet in early next year. Other than for example Google Wallet the payment credentials are stored on the users SIM card rather than on the phone itself.

Deutsche Telekom will also extend into financial services and become a credit card issuer for MasterCard. The telco giant will issue NFC-enabled MasterCard credit cards in Europe via its subsidiary company ClickandBuy, the owner of an e-money license.

Thomas Kiessling, Chief Product and Innovation Officer for Deutsche Telekom commented, “This is a huge step on our way to increase mobile payments. With MasterCard we have a well-known and experienced partner generating growth in this important market segment. We want to build a comprehensive ecosystem around mobile payment, helping Telekom to realize its strategy of being the first choice for customers regarding connected life and work”.

Check out the promo video to see how MyWallet works:

Over the years, credit cards have become the most popular payment methods for online purchases worldwide. Although new payment solutions like PayPal or Dwolla and alternative payment methods such as Bitcoin are gaining traction, credit cards have established as default e-commerce payment method. This is particularly the case for international transactions – there is almost no way around credit cards for online merchants that want to sell international. In this article we take a closer look at the credit card payment ecosystem. The next article will focus on how to choose a merchant account and payment service provider.

How credit card processing works

Credit card processing involves several parties, the customer, the bank that issues the credit card to the customer (issuing bank), the merchant, the merchant bank (acquirer bank) and last but not least the credit card network (e.g. Visa, MasterCard or American Express). In most cases online merchants also use a 3^rd party payment service provider (PSP) that bundles a variety of payment methods and acts as a gateway that can connect to multiple acquiring banks and credit card associations. Furthermore a PSP can offer additional services such as risk management, reporting, fraud protection and multi-currency support.

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Online Payment

• Online payment company Dwolla wins a Best of Show Award at FinovateSpring, a conference about innovative financial and banking technology. Dwolla is a web based payment platform that allows users to send, receive, and request money from other users. The service is free for micro-transactions, for transactions above $10 Dwolla charges a flat fee of $0.25. The company received the award for their new FISync technology that enables users to integrate their bank accounts directly with the Dwolla platform.

Mobile Payment

• Mobile wallet service ISIS, a joint venture between the U.S. carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, add support for American Express cards. ISIS is a mobile wallet payment service based on NFC technology. Read more
• MasterCard starts its new PayPass Wallet service. Customers can store their payment credentials in the digital wallet and use the service to pay online and in stores. Tap-and-go in-store payments can be made using a NFC-enabled smartphone and the PayPass Wallet app. Read more

Cards

• Citi Ventures, Citi’s venture arm, invests $3.3M in online payment and ID verification company Jumio. Jumio’s Netswipe solution turns a webcam into a credit card scanner. The camera analyzes and verifies the physical credit card in real time. Card holders only have to approve the transaction by entering the security code number and the additional security and authentication mechanism 3-D Secure of Visa and MasterCard. The service supports Visa, MasterCard, JCB, Diners Club and American Express credit cards. Read more

Mobile payments have been one of the main topics at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The congress is organized by the GSM Association (GSMA), the global industry association of mobile operators and related companies. It is not just about presenting the latest mobile devices; it is also about showing the future of mobile technology.

Mobile Payment

Mobile Payments are broadening outside of digital goods and services: Carrier billing provider BOKU announced a partnership with MasterCard to expand its payments technology to cover e-commerce and retail point-of-sale. The new BOKU Accounts service allows subscribers to make payments online, in-app, and in-store anywhere MasterCard is accepted. At the same time Facebook is starting to cut out mobile payment providers of the transaction cycle. Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor announced during his MWC Keynote that Facebook is partnering with major mobile network operators (including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telefónica) and will provide its own carrier billing solution. At present Facebook uses third party providers such as BOKU or Zong to process mobile payments.

Traditional financial service companies are going mobile:

• Visa and Vodafone announced at the conference to join forces and develop a mobile payment platform based on Visa prepaid accounts.
• Money transfer giant Western Union (in cooperation with mobile operator WIND) is going to launch a mobile money transfer service in Italy.

Innovative mobile payment services presented their latest developments:

• iZettle’s mobile payment solution that allows users to accept card payments using their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch gains traction and is expanding into tree new countries.
• Mobile payment start-up boxPAY launched and presented an in-app payment service for Google’s Android platform.

Near Field Communication

Near field communication (NFC) services are gaining momentum and have become one of the trending topics at the MWC this year. The GSMA has recently published a set of industry specifications to enable the development of secure and ubiquitous mobile NFC services.

• Smartcard and digital security companies such as Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient showcased their NFC-services at the MWC.
• The Logic Group and ViVOtech announced to work together to enable customers to shop via their NFC-enabled smartphones.
• Mobile payment joint venture ISIS has teamed-up with BarclayCard, Capital One, and Chase.

MasterCard is investing in mFoundry, a mobile banking and payments solutions provider for retailers and financial institutions. In addition to the strategic investment MasterCard and mFoundry announced an international partnership, combining MasterCard’s NFC-based PayPass technology with mFoundry’s mobile financial services platform, to make mobile payments accessible to more customers.

Founded in 2004, California-based mFoundry now has more than 500 banks and credit unions customers for their software-as-a-service (SaaS) mobile banking and payments technology. mFoundry developed and manages Starbucks Card Mobile application, one of the most successful mobile payment services in the US.

The collaboration will help MasterCard to expand its PayPass technology to more payment providers and strengthening the company’s position in the emerging field of mobile payments. “This collaboration is going to allow more banks, credit unions and mobile phone operators around the world to offer their customers the convenience and security of Mobile PayPass,” commented Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer, MasterCard.

Today, MasterCard and Intel announced a strategic collaboration to improve the security and consumer payment experience for online shopping. According to the companies, the collaboration will combine MasterCard’s expertise in payment processing with Intel’s strengths in hardware-based security.

Therefore they plan to combine MasterCard’s NFC-based PayPass solution and Intel’s Identity Protection Technology (IPT) available a Intel’s Ultrabook laptops. IPT enables consumers to use a two-factor authentication and hardware-based display protection. Their new solution is designed to replace the old way of making payment online by manually entering the credit card details. Using an IPT-enabled reader, users can pay for online purchases with a tap of their PayPass card, tag, or smart phone on an Ultrabook.

George Thangadurai, general manager of PC Client Services Division at Intel said: “Our goal is to enable users of Ultrabook devices and future generations of Intel-based PCs to enjoy the convenience of e-commerce while making online payments safer from malware and hackers with the advanced security capabilities of Intel Identity Protection Technology.”

CSI Enterprises, a provider of financial solutions for enterprises and businesses, launches its globalVCard mobile app for iOS and BlackBerry devices. The CSI globalVCard app is a payment method that allows the user to create virtual MasterCard account numbers from their mobile device. The app is only available for CSI MasterCard customers. The Android app was already introduced in September. With the launch for iOS and BlackBerry, globalVCard will now be available to nearly 92% of U.S. smartphone users.

The service provides enhanced security features including pin-prompting at setup and the option to create single and multi-use virtual MasterCard account numbers for each payment, without storing sensitive credit card data on the mobile phone. Unlike Google Wallet, the CSI service targets business professional mobile payments not consumer retail purchases and coupon retentions. Currently the service does not support NFC technology, but CSI already announced future updates that will include NFC enabled PayPass Integration.

“The vast mobile payment arena is still very much under development. CSI’s entire business plan is built around two words: Control and Security. We are ensuring that the newly launched CSI globalVCard™ app is nothing shy of any of our other innovative business payment solutions that we have offered for over two decades,” says Keith Stone, CSI President and CEO.