Mastercard Launches Its Passkeys Service In India

Mastercard has launched passkeys for payments in India. This is the first step in a worldwide launch. According to Mastercard, the new system will first be tried out with some of India’s biggest payment companies. This includes payment aggregators like Razorpay, PayU, and Juspay, online stores like BigBasket, and top banks such as Axis Bank.

The card issuer said its new Payment Passkey Service will let customers buy things by using a face or fingerprint scan on their device. This means people can make purchases by verifying their identity with their face or fingerprint.

Mastercard’s Passkeys Boosts Secured Payment In India

The new system uses tokens to protect a customer’s payment details. This ensures that actual personal information isn’t shared with others. The token is a special encrypted code made by a hashing algorithm, which can be used by fraudsters and scammers.

According to the update, as soon as users set up passkeys, only need to select a digital card and use a face or fingerprint scan or a PIN on their device to finish a purchase. The device is already connected to a public key that quickly confirms the transaction.

Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer, said the company is growing with safer online payments and a token-based system through its new Payment Passkey Service in India. He noted that this technology is set to boost security and convenience. Lambert stated that Mastercard’s dedication to a token-based future is stronger than ever.

Arif Khan, chief innovation officer at Razorpay, said the firm is excited to work with Mastercard to bring the Payment Passkey Service to India. He explained that this new service will make transactions safer and improve the user experience in online shopping by using biometric authentication.

Mastercard Plans To Enable Password-Free Payments

Mastercard announced that its goals for using passkeys are to make transactions safer, reduce issues, and move payments away from relying on passwords. The company noted that even the latest passwords are becoming more vulnerable to online scams like phishing, message interception, and SIM swapping.

The Reserve Bank of India’s Annual Report for 2023-2024 reveals that fraud cases in India have surged by nearly 300 percent over the past two years.

A July report notes that the country’s very popular Unified Payments Interface system has become a target for fraudsters. It reveals government figures showing over 95,000 cases of UPI fraud in the previous fiscal period that ended last year, an increase from 77,000 cases the year before.

Mastercard said it will soon roll out the Payment Passkey Service to additional regions after the pilot phase. The company is dedicated to achieving complete e-commerce tokenization in Europe by the end of the decade.