U.S. multinational financial services corporation MasterCard has launched its digital wallet service, MasterPass, in Ukraine. Ukraine on July 15 became the 32nd country in which the electronic service has been introduced.
MasterPass is an online service that helps users pay electronically with any bankcard or electronic money from one place.
All of a user’s personal data — bank card number, delivery location, and so on — only has to be entered into the once system: MasterPass compiles in one place all the data it needs to conduct an electronic transaction, and then payments can be made with a couple of clicks — the user just selects the card and presses the submit payment button.
And the security of payments is entirely covered by MasterCard.
Retailers can connect to the service for free: they just need to contact the company’s support center. After that, a link with “Buy with MasterPass” will appear on their website or in their smartphone application.
“MasterPass could launch a great wave of e-commerce development in Ukraine, opening up new opportunities for customers, vendors and banks,” country manager of MasterCard Europe Vira Platonova said on July 15. “According to the statistics, 38 percent of orders via websites and 97 percent via smartphones fail to be completed because of the inconvenience of the payment process.”
Currently, more than 2,000 internet retailers in Ukraine support the service.
Ilia Kenigshtein, an advisor to Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy, says MasterPass entrance is a positive signal.
“MasterPass is not a classical e-wallet. This is not PayPal or Webmoney. It is more of a service that keeps various cards and delivery addresses,” Kenigshtein posted to his Facebook page on July 15. “It’s the wallet of wallets. As a result, it saves time, while the security increases because the website of an (online) store is not given any payment data.”
The company says it plans to launch an offline near field communication contactless payments service through the MasterPass application in 2017. The same service will start operating in the United States in 2016.
This article first appeared in the Kyiv Post, a syndication partner of Ukraine Digital News.
