MasterCard has recently launched a new global personal payment service called MasterCard Send that will allow businesses, governments, merchants, and non-profits to transfer funds, in real-time, to consumers located overseas or domestically.
This new service is MasterCard’s effort to digitize the personal payment system to offer greater convenience, security, and choice to both payment senders and receivers. With MasterCard Send, you can receive funds anytime, anywhere from your friends and families instantly through any providers, including money transfer operators, issuers, and merchants.
This includes receiving funds into bank accounts, mobile money, via cash agent outlets and any cards. The best part is the size of the payment doesn’t affect the time a transaction takes –this is undoubtedly a killer feature.
MasterCard Send is designed in-line with Federal Reserve initiative aimed at improving the money transfer system in terms of speed, efficiency, security, and is currently rolling out in the US only.
Barb King, a group head in the MasterCard Payment Systems Integrity Group, <href=”#.VWUwDVOffwo”>described the service to PYMNTS as “a breakthrough platform in the industry.”
“We think [personal payments] is a growing space in the industry, [be it] person-to-person payments, business to consumer, [or] government to consumer. When you look at some of the industry statistics that exist, in terms of the opportunity to displace cash and checks, we’re talking trillions of dollars”, said King.
MasterCard Send will help to pay insurance claims, tax refunds, online marketplace payouts, rebates and social benefits—everything in real-time. Freeshipping.com and Berkshire Hathaway already plan to leverage the benefits of MasterCard Send for disbursements.
“This new payment platform will allow us to deliver rebates and cash-back payouts quickly and seamlessly to subscribers who register any debit card account, including non-MasterCard ones, with FreeShipping.com.” said Tom Caporaso, chief executive officer of FreeShipping.com.
With this new payment service, MasterCard tried emulating one of the two major advantages of bitcoin payments—quick transactions. However, information about the commercials and business model has not been disclosed yet so it is unclear if they plan to emulate the other advantage of bitcoin—i.e. low-cost transactions.
MasterCard Send appears to be a tough competitor to centralized operators such as Venmo and PayPal, but not to peer-to-peer, decentralized payments. However, it is evident to say that it will definitely revolutionize the industry and has the potential to be a top favorite over other players.
So what’s your view about this new payment service? Would you prefer to use MasterCard Send? Please share your opinion below.
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I’m not sure I see the point. From the story, to use FreeShipping.com, I’d still have to give FreeShipping.com my card number and other information, which means that is still at risk. I’d have thought the idea was to create a number that businesses and government entities could use to send me money and only MasterCard Send would have my card information. Does Send just simplify the process for those sending money to consumers?