Tapping into the future of payments

There may be no better illustration of the velocity of innovation than the simple tap. In a fraction of a second, a tiny antenna embedded in your payment card, smartphone or wearable relays encrypted data that is then vetted by the card processor for potential fraud and authorized by the card issuer.

But it’s not just the speed of contactless transactions — it’s the speed of adoption. The origin of the technology that enables tap and go dates back to World War II, and it’s been three decades since what is believed to be the first contactless payment was made via a prepaid card for a ride on a city bus in Seoul. While parts of the world embraced contactless as the default more quickly than others, contactless payments truly accelerated in the late 2010s as global transit agencies embraced tap to ride, digital wallets became ubiquitous and touch-free transactions became a necessity during the pandemic.

Contactless now represents more than two of every three in-person transactions on the Mastercard network. It’s muscle memory. It’s a reflex that is propelling fast and secure consumer experiences and, more broadly, the digitization of payments. And it is capable of so much more.

We’ve already harnessed contactless technology to make it simple for merchants to accept payments through their own smartphones. Our Tap on Phone capabilities, now live in more than 110 markets, empower micro-merchants who need flexible and low-cost acceptance options, offer queue-busting solutions for large retailers, and allow people to tap for purchases in flight on major airlines. In addition to enabling Tap on Phone solutions with our partners, Mastercard’s own Tap on Phone solution, called Cloud Commerce, moves key functionalities to the cloud, helping our partners deploy these capabilities at scale, including most recently with FOMO Pay in Singapore.

As the physical and digital experiences continue to converge, we’re taking the tap beyond physical checkout. With our Tap to More set of contactless modalities, we can make digital commerce even faster, safer and simpler, from instantly provisioning a card into a mobile wallet to verifying a transaction to sending money to friends and family, all with just a tap.

Let’s start with the card information itself. With Tap to Add​, you can tap your card on your phone to provision it into your mobile wallet or store it on file with a merchant’s app or e-commerce wallet. This is enabled by MDES, Mastercard’s tokenization service, which enhances security by converting physical card numbers to verified tokens and binds them to a cryptogram, keeping credentials safe even if compromised. Tap to Activate eliminates the need for calling your bank or going to an ATM to activate your new or reissued card.

During an e-commerce transaction, Tap to Verify confirms you’re in possession of your card when using your mobile wallet, bank app or merchant app, delivering more peace of mind without any added friction, like checking your messages or email for a one-time passcode.  

The ease of tapping in store can be replicated in e-commerce through Tap to Pay. If you’re shopping online, you can tap your card against your phone to complete your transaction, without having to type in your card information, and you can also save your card on file for future purchases. It’s another step toward Mastercard’s vision to phase out manual card entry online by 2030.

With Tap to Send or Receive, you can simply tap your card or mobile phone against someone else’s to complete the transaction for peer-to-peer payment — no need to search for their handle or type in their name. This is powered by our Mastercard Send platform, which enables near real-time transfers without the multistep process of entering account information, providing routing numbers and validating credentials.

The industry is taking notice. Tap to Provision capabilities powered by MDES are live across more than 40 markets around the world. Tap to Verify has been launched with Stripe in the U.S., and Tap to Pay is being piloted with Ingresse in Brazil and OpenRice in Hong Kong.

And this is just the start. The speed of contactless adoption could not have occurred without trust in the tap. That trust can enhance our ability to manage and exchange anything of value, from money to identity credentials to medical data, by turning taps into verified tokens. That unlocks more ways to tap on any type of connected device — from smart mirrors in stores to connected cars on the go.

Imagine a token economy imbued with the highest level of security and personal control over payments and data. That’s tapping into the future.