Mastercard and Here Working on In-Car Payments

During the CES in Las Vegas, Here Technologies and Mastercard announced they are expanding their partnership. Together, they will design on-the-go services for mobile connected customers. This new agreement should lead them to propose a payment system for on-board, in-car purchases.

As they have been focusing on connected vehicles, the card scheme and mapping specialist unveiled a service called “In-Vehicle Payment”, building on real-time contextual information.

Here intends to enhance their value proposition for connected drivers, and improve their daily lives with a set of secure services, best suited for their own, profile-based needs.

Here relies on analysing location data to propose an automated payment service. For instance, they could allow drivers to automatically pay their toll roads fee when their car drives through a given section. This feature relies on cross-referenced location-specific data.

Comments – In-car payments breaking new grounds

Nearly one billion connected vehicles are likely to ride the roads by 2025, and self-driving cars are expected to hit the market soon. This means extra opportunities for payment industry specialists. In this context, and as the commerce sector started to shift from typical payment cards to smartphone-based transactions, car manufacturers and payment companies are placing their bet on connected cars rather than on smartphones.

Several announcements have been made at this year’s CES, including similar partnerships. For example, Mobivia entered CarPay-Diem’s capital to create an automatic payment solution for gas refills. Honda and Visa also stressed a convenient payment service enabling car drivers to pay for fuel from their car, among other options.

This is not the first move towards in-car payments for Mastercard either. Tests have been conducted with GM and IBM on a mobile platform allowing drivers to buy from their cars. Yet, the group relies on Here to investigate other scenarios, including logistics issues and other location-based offers. Contextual data is used by way of adding to the actual payment transaction.