Mastercard Inc (MA) Looks To Multiple Devices To Combat Visa Inc (V) And Others

Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) is aiming to transform every device a person has into a payment device to combat the likes of rival Visa Inc (NYSE:V), Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer, told Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg’s Money Makers.In the future, the Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) executive said, his company will be competing with Visa Inc (NYSE:V) not just through cards and a limited number of smartphones, it will be all devices people carry around.

 “In our view at Mastercard, every device you have is going to be a commerce device. And what we are building [are] the capabilities that allow you to take advantage of that,” McLaughlin said.

The executive said that his company is taking this view because it is seeing how much the lives of people around the world are being transformed by technology.

Furthermore, Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) is betting on no security technology becoming overly dominant than other technologies in the marketplace. According to McLaughlin, we will likely see a confluence of technologies like fingerprint scanning, retinal scanning, voice security and others to protect payment systems.

“There will not be one winner. It is a combination of all of that. If you think about in payments, what we need to know is that you are you and that you have authorized that transaction. Anything which can do that credibly, anything which can do it in a trusted way, we can take advantage of to make it more secure,” he said.

He said that as Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) moves to the digital realm to combat rivals like Visa Inc (NYSE:V), it is looking to not only transform every device people have to commerce devices, it is looking to make them as secure if not more secure than the systems the company now has.

The comments from the Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) executive were made on the sidelines of the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas.

Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital reported owning about 11.77 million Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) shares by the end of the second quarter. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reported owning about 1.8 million Visa Inc (NYSE:V) shares by June 30. In fact, Visa Inc (NYSE:V), along with Mastercard, were recently featured as one of the seven stocks Warren Buffett and Billionaires Are Crazy About.