Dive Brief:

• Mastercard and Oracle have announced a partnership focused on streamlining digital payment experiences, including in-store mobile payment, for consumers interfacing with retailers, restaurants and hotels.

• The partners plan to develop and scale new in-store payment experiences, including a Qkr! with Masterpass mobile app. Mastercard will also expand availability of the app to the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Singapore and South Africa throughout the year.

• Mastercard and Oracle also are aiming to provide retailers a single, integrated digital payment and fraud prevention offering covering both in-store and online operations. Integrating Masterpass into Oracle products also allows retailers to provide a seamless check-out experience across channels.

Dive Insight:

At a time when new players and digital payment options are shaking up the financial world, partnering up to provide a unified approach to digital payments is probably a good idea for one of the traditional giants in the payments sector and one of the major suppliers of in-store payment terminals.

This is just the latest way in which Mastercard is trying to move in step with a changing payments sector. Over the last year, it has gotten aggressive on the digital payments front, rolling out contactless payment support for in-store payment terminals in a handful of countries and with plans to expand to more countries including the U.S. It also has been working closely with some of the alternatives in the digital payments space: For example, in October, it announced a deal with Google to coordinate support of Android Pay for its Masterpass users.

These days, payment support needs to go hand-in-hand with fraud prevention, and Mastercard Payment Gateway Services' anti-fraud capabilities will also reportedly play a big role in this partnership. Perhaps having those capabilities close at hand will help Oracle rebound from the hacking episode it suffered last year on its point-of-sale payment portal.

Meanwhile, it's interesting that for all the talk about omnichannel, what gets most of the attention is how retailers are marketing or enabling customers to search and browse for products across multiple channels. However, providing a unified payments experience, like Mastercard and Oracle are doing in this partnership, can be a critical part of granting customers a seamless and simple omnichannel experience.