Mastercard helps Checkout.com facilitate faster payments in Asia-Pacific

The news: Checkout.com started using Mastercard Send to enable faster payments for consumers and businesses in Singapore, per a press release. It will extend the solution to Australia and Hong Kong later this year.

Mastercard Send is Mastercard’s faster payments network. It lets businesses send payments to more than 1.5 billion debit, credit, and prepaid cards.

Checkout.com’s opportunity: The Mastercard Send integration can help Checkout.com in three ways.

• Offering more diverse payment options can tighten client loyalty. Businesses working with Checkout.com can send customers payments to their cards—giving them faster access and convenience. This can make Checkout.com a more attractive provider for businesses in the region to work with.
• More high-value-payment use cases can grow revenues. Mastercard Send supports a wide array of high-value-payment use cases, like insurance payouts and online marketplace payments. This can help Checkout.com attract a more diverse client base, opening new revenue streams.
• It can gain a stronger presence in Asia-Pacific. Supporting real-time payments in the region can position Checkout.com for growth as key markets keep adopting the payment method. The share of transactions made via real-time payments infrastructure in Singapore, for example, is expected to increase 78% between 2021 and 2026, per ACI Worldwide.

Mastercard’s benefit: partnering with Checkout.com can give Mastercard a stronger foothold in Asia-Pacific and increase its cross-border payments volume.

• Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa accounted for 26% of Mastercard’s total gross dollar volume in Q4.
• Mastercard Send has been key to the firm’s cross-border payments volume, which grew 31% year over year (YoY) last quarter.

The tie-up can also help Mastercard retain share in the region. Many of the domestic payment networks in Asia-Pacific formed links that threaten to undermine the firm’s market share.

The bigger picture: Real-time payments are gaining steam across Asia-Pacific thanks to factors like new technologies, regulatory pressures, and merchant and customer expectations, per Global Payments.

• But the market still has room for growth: Real-time payments are primarily used for low-value transactions across the region.
• In some markets, this is due to limitations in banking infrastructure—and the fact that popular mobile wallets tend to target peer-to-peer payments and other low-value payment use cases.
• In the long term, expanding faster payments use cases will require collaboration between governments, banks, and fintechs.

Related content: Check out our US Payment Card Networks 2022 report to learn about other growth opportunities Mastercard is targeting.

This article originally appeared in Insider Intelligence's Payments Innovation Briefing—a daily recap of top stories reshaping the payments industry. Subscribe to have more hard-hitting takeaways delivered to your inbox daily.

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