Public-private dialogues are critical to some of the biggest policy and infrastructure developments in cross-border payments, not least the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments. We hear from key figures at Mastercard to understand how the company is thinking about future opportunities in the space.
Alan Marquard, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Transfer Solutions, Mastercard
Jesse McWaters, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Regulatory Advocacy, Mastercard
Daniel Webber, CEO, FXC Intelligence.
The future of cross-border payments is a topic that is front-of-mind for many players in the industry. While fintech challengers have helped shape the past few years of development, future change is in part being driven by multinational and supranational initiatives such as the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments.
The Roadmap, which is set to see the release of its yearly progress report within the next few weeks, lays out key performance indicators for the cross-border payments space – built on C2C, C2B, B2B and B2C data provided by FXC Intelligence – around speed, transparency and costs that both public and private entities play a part in meeting. As a result, the FSB has engaged in significant ongoing dialogue with key industry stakeholders both during the development of the targets and in the year since it published its first benchmark report in October 2023.
One such stakeholder is Mastercard. Although primarily known as a card issuer, the company is also a significant player in the B2B2X field, providing payments infrastructure that underpins a broad range of cross-border payments solutions globally under its Mastercard Move proposition.
“We have a well-established money transfer offering that’s partly domestic, but largely cross-border,” explains Alan Marquard, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Transfer Solutions at Mastercard.
Within Mastercard Move, remittances have traditionally dominated flows, but disbursements have become increasingly important in the last few years, particularly given the rise of use cases such as insurance payouts, marketplaces, the gig economy and the wider creator economy. The company is also “increasingly looking” at the B2B payments space.
Beyond Mastercard Move, Mastercard also runs real-time payment systems in around 12 of the world’s largest economies. And while these are inherently domestic, there is growing discussion about their interlinking and interoperability. However, while Mastercard’s current offerings are largely built on its card network, the company is also exploring digital and on-ledger style payments infrastructure.
“Fundamentally, Mastercard thinks about itself as a multi-rail entity,” says Jesse McWaters, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Regulatory Advocacy at Mastercard.
“We’re really interested in the way in which new technology might unlock new potential and new types of transactions.”
This has seen Mastercard work on the integration with CBDCs, including through collaborations with organisations such as the Regulated Liability Network, as well as its own research and development, including the creation of the blockchain-based Mastercard Multi-Token Network. The company is also one of the 40+ private sector participants in the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Project Agorá, which is set to explore the use of tokenisation in wholesale cross-border payments.
As a key supplier of global payments infrastructure and contributor to such initiatives, Mastercard engages in extensive dialogue with the public sector over cross-border payments infrastructure and policy, and its leadership has considerable thoughts on how the space can and should develop.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about payment systems and payment system infrastructure,” says Marquard.
by Daniel Webber
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