Mastercard & R3 to Work Together on international Blockchain-powered Payment System

The world of finance is growing more and more automated, with major payments provider Mastercard and R3, a growing blockchain development company having made a joint announcement about their partnership through a press release on the 11th of September.

They hope to put their forces together and create a pilot program that will improve connections for banks, payment infrastructures, and financial schemes. The pilot program will be supported by Mastercard’s clearing and settlement network.

Mastercard supposedly has a “multi-rail” strategy that is going to increase the options for their customers in regards to moving money. The pilot is expected to lower payment overhead costs, increase liquidity, and improve the standards and protocols between banks and domestic clearing systems.

In addition to these benefits, Mastercard announced that new “value add” services will become available for their clients as a result of the partnership with R3.

Peter Klein, executive vice president of the new (as of yet unnamed) payment platform for Mastercard and David E. Rutter, CEO of R3, both left their comments about the partnership.

Mr. Klein explained that the development of new and better cross-border B2B payment solutions will improve worldwide connectivity in the account to account sector, and that is precisely Mastercard’s ambition. He added: “Our goal is to deliver global payment infrastructure choice and connectivity as demonstrated through our recent strategic acquisitions and partnerships, including our relationship with R3.” He also added that this partnership reaffirms their commitment to innovation, on the home-front and as a result of the partnership itself.

Mr. Rutter’s comments shared his excitement to partner with Mastercard and to help with the development of the digital payments industry. He said: “All institutions – large or small – rely on the ability to send and receive payments, but all too often the technology they rely upon is cumbersome and expensive.” He ended his comment with a correlation between Corda and cross-border payments. He explained that Corda is built for enterprise use cases just like this one and that he and R3 are looking forward to bringing blockchain closer to the existing payments businesses around the world.

We reached out to the media contacts listed in the press release and asked them a few specific questions. We wanted to know about their estimates for when the pilot program will be launched, about the differences between the current system and once the pilot program is implemented. We also asked, what the new “value add” services are going to be, and whether they will provide support for banks when communicating the idea of implementing their solution with the domestic clearing system.

To wrap everything, we also want to know if banks and domestic clearing systems will be required to join the R3 consortium in order to take advantage of the technology.

Featured image via Pexels.