Mastercard is making a strategic step forward with its Masterpass, by integrating with established mobile pay platforms such as Android Pay and Samsung Pay.

Mastercard’s Masterpass, its comprehensive mobile payment option, will also see integration with the mobile payment options of each of the credit card company’s new partners. Mastercard holders who use Samsung Pay, Android Pay or Microsoft Wallet will now be able to shop anywhere of the hundreds of thousands of retailers that are compatible with Masterpass.

“Our biggest focus is building out the footprint of Masterpass,” said James Anderson, group executive of platforms and emerging payments at Mastercard. “These partnerships are good for the consumers, the retailers and the issuers.”

Masterpass master class
Masterpass allows the participating retailers to provide a branded and customizable mobile payment experience for their customers.

Now, with the integration of popular mobile payment systems such as Samsung Pay and Android Pay, the credit card company is positioning itself to make its Masterpass system even more appealing to both consumers and the retailers it courts as partners.

Masterpass’ main appeal is both its speed and simplicity and its security. The quickness of using Masterpass comes from the fact that it is integrated directly with retailers POS systems which make communication between the device and the retailer’s system quick and efficient.

On top of that, Mastercard touts the tokenization of payments, in which users information is kept secret and communicated discretely directly between the phone and the checkout system, as the most secure way of doing mobile payments and mobile checkouts.

Now that Masterpass is partnered with Samsung, Google and Microsoft, all of those payment systems will be extended the same secure level of tokenization that general Masterpass users already experience.

Growing the field
Mastercard is positioning its Masterpass as a comprehensive solution to the proble of competing mobile payment standards by recruiting a large amount of retailers and payment providers to all run on a single system.

In doing so, Mastercard is seeking to provide benefits to both the retailers who accept mobile payments and the consumers who make them.

On the one hand, consumers who are both Mastercard users and users of one of the partnering mobile payment providers now have a quick and easy way to combine the two without downloading any additional apps or doing any extra work.

Similarly, retailers who accept Masterpass now have access to consumers who make use of the popular payment programs provided by the likes of Samsung and Google without doing additional development work with their own money to make that integration possible.

With one partnership, the retailers have extended their reach to three new subsets of users who, by virtue of already being users of mobile payment systems, are more likely to make use of those systems when they make purchases in-store.

Mastercard has spent the last year developing its own mobile payment systems as well as encouraging others to experiment with what is possible with mobile payments. For example, the credit card provider opened up its API last month to partners in order to encourage them to experiment with the data provide by their users (see story).

Mastercard is positioning itself as a leader in the mobile payment world, not just in what it does with its own system but what it encourages other developers, brands and retailers to do with it as well.

“There’s been this great energy to drive things forward in the mobile space,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s been a lot of forward momentum around making payments something that you can do anywhere and from your mobile device.”