M-payment: MasterCard Opening Singapore Innovation R&D Center
- MasterCard Worldwide has just opened a R&D platform in Singapore.
- This centre will be focusing on the creation of contactless, smart card and mobile payment solutions.
- MasterCard also plans to rely on this centre to develop offers in Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
- Additional labs and a Chip Centre of Excellence (CCoE) should also provide for this new strategy.
- MasterCard’s positioning on the development of groundbreaking offers coincides with a new strategy praised by many financial and banking institutions as they are opening an increasing number of innovation-dedicated labs today.
- End 2011, the Commonwealth Bank, for instance, launched a community lab relying on crowdsourcing (IdeaBank). Also, a Citi Innovation Lab has been opened in Singapore for institutional clients. In Europe, a contest (the FinAppsParty) enabled La Caixa to develop its mobile app gallery.
- These initiatives aim at fighting competition and craft solutions based on new, increasingly mobile and connected technologies. For MasterCard, this is also a means to resist Visa’s assaults: since 2011, the latter has been partaking in several innovative projects and taking the lead with experiments through all payment media (cards, Internet and mobile).