The world for rent: here is the future of payments according to Mastercard

In Dublin’s new tech hub, an avant-garde building where 300 people of various nationalities work, between billiard tables and sustainable lighting, MasterCard has unveiled its vision of the future of payments, structured around 9 pillars.

Ken Moorechief innovation officer of the credit card giant, divided his presentation into three different areas: the creation of new faster and more flexible payment options; the growing overlapping of physical world and digital world; attention to sustainability and inclusiveness.

Tokenization, digital wallets and programmable payments are the innovations that we will see between now and 2030 in the world of payments. They rely on technologies such as the blockchain, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, which will allow, for example, to bring together all our data, from health data to our properties, in a single, secure and reliable digital wallet.
The world will be “tokenized”: the digitization of any type of assetfrom the beach house to personal data, makes their value accessible and tradable, practically creating new kinds of “currency”.

Large-scale programmable payments, even for complex transactions, managed through the blockchain will result in a revolution in supply chainsand will make it easier to pay, for example, royalties. The rights of a work, in fact, will be codified in the work itself and in its payment. This also makes it possible to accurately measure the use of a good or service, which will give further impetus to “as-a-service” worldwhich no longer provides for the purchase but the “rent”.

The overlap of physical and virtual world will see the birth of connected finance, solutions that streamline payments across domains, whether physical (shops, train stations), digital (online games, super apps) or virtual (smart cities, metaverses).

Finally, sustainability: new credit scoring systems, combined with lending solutions, will make it possible for communities and people historically with little access to credit to access money. Moore clarified that small and medium-sized enterprises are the ones targeted by Mastercard, which wants to facilitate their entry into the digital world and into the circuits of electronic and global payments.

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