Mastercard becomes OTP-free in APAC to secure online transactions

By Gloria Mathias

Mastercard has announced the latest enhancement to its new Mastercard Payment Passkey Service, which enables secure, on-device biometric authentication through facial scans or fingerprints, the same way consumers unlock their phones every day.

By combining the fraud-busting powers of tokenisation, convenience of payment passkeys, and the addition of streamlined guest checkout capability courtesy of Click to Pay, consumers can now enjoy seamless, one-click checkout across devices, browsers, and operating systems, eliminating the need for static or one-time passwords (OTPs).

Crucially, by using Mastercard Click to Pay, online shoppers no longer need to have an account or a saved card on file with a merchant to use biometric authentication with payment passkeys, making quick, easy, and secure guest checkout a reality. At the same time, merchants will see fewer abandoned carts, increased sales, and fraud protection, while issuers will gain top-of-wallet status and customer security, demonstrating the far-reaching benefits for the entire ecosystem.

The launch at the SFF marks the latest milestone in Mastercard’s mission to reinvent checkout. It is also a fast follow-up to the payment technology company’s global launch of biometric authentication enabled by the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service to millions of consumers in India in August of this year and subsequent extensions to critical markets around the world. In just a few months, the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service has rapidly gained momentum with merchants. It continues to scale as leading banks, payment aggregators, and online merchants adopt the service.

“Just as contactless technology made in-person payments seamless and ubiquitous, Mastercard sees the opportunity to bring that same experience to online checkout. That’s why we’re calling ‘time’ on one-time passwords and multi-step payment authentication,” said Sandeep Malhotra, executive vice president, Products & Innovation, Asia Pacific, Mastercard. “With biometric authentication with payment passkeys, shoppers are spared the hassle of cumbersome checkouts while merchants enjoy both speed and security.”

Importantly, by tokenising both payment credentials and biometric authentication, the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service ensures that neither the consumer’s payment credentials, nor biometric data are ever shared with third parties, rendering the data useless to fraudsters and scammers.