Mastercard wants to get rid of card numbers for online shopping
Mastercard Inc. is expanding its efforts to eliminate the use of credit card numbers when customers make purchases online in a bid to fight fraud.
A decade after it first unveiled a technology that replaces consumers’ card numbers with so-called tokens, the company is now processing 1 billion such transactions every week, Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach said in an interview. That’s after it took the payments behemoth three years to process the first billion of such transactions.
Now, Mastercard is planning to expand the use of the technology to replace security measures like passwords with biometric data such as fingerprints or face scans, Miebach said. It’s the latest step that the financial industry is taking to combat the rising issue of online payment fraud, which is expected to exceed $91 billion by 2028.
A decade ago, the common thinking was “if you want to keep it safe, protect data and protect transactions through passwords,” Miebach said at Mastercard’s London offices. “That worked for a while. And then it started to become the vulnerability instead of effective safety and security.”
Mastercard and rival Visa Inc. first introduced token technology about a decade ago after fraudsters had targeted the payment systems of retailers including Target Corp. and Best Buy Co., absconding with tens of millions of consumers’ credit card information. At first, the technology was focused on replacing card numbers with a token that only the networks can unlock, meaning it’s useless if a hacker does get their
