Mastercard Plans To Partner With Indian Government To Facilitate Smart Cities Initiative

US-based financial services corporation, MasterCard has plans to collaborate with the Union and State Governments of India to provide technologies for the ‘Smart Cities’ initiative.

The announcement was made by Porush Singh, Country Corporate Officer (India) and President, South Asian division, MasterCard.

Smart cities is an initiative launched by MasterCard to increase the feasibility of digital payments in developing countries such as India and China. With this move, MasterCard aims at connecting consumers, merchants, governments, financial institutions, NGOs, and digital players with each other to facilitate digital transactions.

Speaking at the 45th Skoch Summit, Porush Singh said, “As a global payments technology company, MasterCard has been enabling cities to become sustainable and more inclusive. MasterCard is keen to partner with the Indian government for the Smart Cities vision. We can develop innovative solutions that will make the lives of people and businesses easier – and help India further strengthen its competitive position in the world economy.”

The company also presented key technologies at the summit that are to be woven into the Smart Cities initiative such as Masterpass and Mastercab.

Initially, Masterpass was launched as a digital wallet in 2014 for the company’s employees. It is an omnichannel, digitally-enabled payment service for consumers. It became available to UK-based Masterpass clients in 2015. It is currently available to customers who use the e-wallet in UK and overseas.

In July this year, MasterCard collaborated with online payment gateway Razorpay to speed up the adoption of online and mobile payments among small businesses in India. As part of the collaboration, MasterCard also invested an undisclosed amount in Razorpay. Razorpay also integrated the MasterCard Payment Gateway to enable merchants and card issuers to authenticate each other prior to the authorisation of a transaction.

This development was first reported in TOI.