TECHNOLOGY access to money has changed the way people think about how they buy things . The safety and convenience of electronic versus carrying around cash or writing cheques is now clear and Mastercard has played a massive part in that shift .”

The dual benefits of digital Two recent projects underline the double-edged benefits of payments digitisation Reeg mentions . The first is Masterpass , an omni-channel digital wallet service that has been rolled out across the USA and is available to use at millions of retail locations in dozens of countries around the world .

Masterpass is a result of one of MasterCard ’ s tried and tested approaches to innovation and recruitment of talent – investments in disruptive technology companies . Indian digital wallet expert C-SAM was recently acquired by

Mastercard and its 350 mobile software engineers have been influential in deploying Masterpass .

“ If you try to grow mobile technology on your own it takes a long time , so this acquisition allowed us to enter the market very quickly ,” Reeg adds . “ This is the next phase in how digital money is going to be managed – people need ease and safety in making payments and this is going to be key .” Indeed , security is the second major advantage of digital over traditional payments . A key area of focus for Mastercard has been development of biometric verification , the company is now piloting its Identity Check system , or what the media has been calling ‘ selfie pay ’. For transactions up to a certain value , consumers can take a picture of themselves which is then verified when they go to make their purchases . This builds on the work already carried out on fingerprint technology , which saw the

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