Mastercard launched Wallet Pay, which lets digital wallets reach each other’s merchants whether a payment runs over contactless, a QR code, or online. A dozen wallets signed on at the start, among them GCash, KakaoPay, Mercado Pago and TenPay Global, concentrated in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Each can now issue cards of its own, whether prepaid, debit or credit, and sell to merchants that take any of Mastercard’s 3.7 billion credentials, rather than building acceptance infrastructure on its own. Mastercard stays the acceptance layer even when the money being spent is a stored wallet balance instead of a card, which earns it tokenization and wallet enablement fees, according to a TD Cowen note.
