Mastercard launches Payments Passkeys in India

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The service will initially be launched as a pilot with some of India’s largest payment service providers, including payment aggregators such as Juspay, Razorpay and PayU, online retailers such as Bigbasket and leading banks such as Axis Bank.

Payment passkeys are a response to increasing fraud rates around the use of one-time passwords (OTP), which are increasingly vulnerable to online scams such as phishing, SIM swapping and message interception. In India, the number of fraud cases has increased by almost 300% in the last two years, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s annual report 2023-2024.

Banks in Singapore have already decided to phase out the use of OTPs in favor of digital tokens for logging into bank accounts after phishing scammers stole at least $14.2 million from customer accounts in 2003.

Mastercard’s Payment Passkey uses device-based biometric authentication methods such as fingerprints or facial scans and tokenization to secure a consumer’s online checkout interaction, ensuring the transaction is secure and no financial account details are shared with third parties – making them useless to fraudsters and fraudsters might .

“By launching the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service in India, we are advancing secure online checkout and our vision of a token economy,” said Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard. “Through innovative technology that increases security and convenience, we are creating a more transparent trading ecosystem for everyone. As we continue to lead in digital payments, our commitment to a tokenized future is stronger than ever.”

Following the initial pilot program in India, the company will roll out the service to more consumers and financial institutions around the world in the coming months.