Mastercard envisions the future of e-commerce without manual entries of physical card numbers, passwords or one-time codes needed for secure purchases.
Mastercard today announced plans to streamline online shopping by 2030, eliminating passwords and manual card entry in favour of biometric verification and authorisation methods like fingerprints and facial recognition.
This initiative combines on-device biometric authentication with tokenisation, ensuring secure transactions without card numbers. Mastercard aims to reduce fraud, simplify checkout, and increase convenience by reducing the number of manually input data in online shopping routines.
Despite its popularity, the e-commerce segment is still plagued with many pressing issues. Due to exposed card details, online fraud rates are seven times higher than in-store, leading to significant losses for both merchants and card issuers. Mastercard research also shows that nearly two-thirds of shoppers still struggle to manually enter card information, with 25% abandoning their carts due to complex or slow checkout experiences. According to another study, over 50% of customers abandon their carts if the checkout process takes longer than 30 seconds. That speed is hard to achieve with loads of manual entry fields.
Mastercard’s Click To Pay technology targets this pain point, introducing automated experiences into online checkout flows and enabling even guest shoppers to bypass manual data entry. It is used by issuers like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ING Spain, NatWest, and Santander Mexico, as well as acquirers, payment service providers and other channel partners including Adyen, Prestashop, DNA Payments, Worldline and Yuno
Another part of Mastercard’s vision, the concept of numberless cards, would further reduce the risk of fraud in case a card is lost or stolen. That ushers a new era of safe and seamless payments.
Today, over 30% of Mastercard transactions are tokenised, and adoption is growing in regions like India. The country was also the first to test the new Mastercard Payment Passkey Service, which facilitates payment authorisation with device-based biometric authentication methods such as fingerprints or facial scans to streamline online checkouts.
At present, tokenisation is helping cut down cart abandonment and boosting transaction approvals by 3-6% in various countries. This translates into up to $2 billion in extra sales each month for merchants globally.
According to the company’s observations, the vision of numberless cards and ubiquitous biometrics is already unfolding in major markets and will become widespread within a few years. Collaborations with banks and merchants are driving the global implementation of this technology.
“Just like the transition from signing and swiping to tapping cards, we’re now moving from manual entry and passwords to seamless and secure payments in just a few clicks. With this shift we are protecting sensitive data through advanced encryption and tokenization technologies. As payments continue to be embedded across a range of commerce experiences, we’re leading the way to a global economy that empowers everyone – providing consumers with greater control, convenience and peace-of-mind while unlocking new sales for merchants, and lowering fraud for issuers.”
Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard
