BARCELONA, Spain– MasterCard Worldwide announced it has acquired U.S.-based mobile wallet vendor C-SAM, a company in which it had made a sizable investment in late 2012.

MasterCard did not disclose how much it paid for the vendor, which it seeks to use to help it offer white-label wallets, SDKs and other support through its MasterPass digital wallet and multichannel acceptance network. 

Jorn Lambert, MasterCard’s group executive, digital convergence, told NFC Times that the payment network wants C-SAM in part for its expertise in “dealing with libraries (and) developing SDKs for others to develop a front end (user interface),” he said. “As we are developing our services for banks, around tokenization, around host-card emulation (and secure elements), they (C-SAM) will be a very important piece around that.”

MasterCard also said in a statement that C-SAM’s on-device application and back-end infrastructure would “aid development efforts to enable consumers to use MasterPass both in-store and online across multiple communications technologies, including NFC, QR and bar codes and remote checkout.”

The companies had first announced in May of 2012 they were working together on a white-label wallet targeted at banks or other service providers in Asia-Pacific.

C-SAM, working with MasterCard, developed the NFC-based SmartWallet mobile app used by Singaporean telco StarHub. C-SAM also developed the NFC-enabled wallet used by the Isis joint venture in the U.S. for its two-city pilot. But Isis later hired a new developer to design the Android app for its Isis Mobile Wallet 2.0, which it used for its national launch last fall. C-SAM continues to handle the back-end wallet platform for Isis.

C-SAM has supplied wallet technology for several non-NFC projects in India and elsewhere, such as Mexico. The vendor also has supplied wallet technology to Japan-based vendor Dai Nippon Printing.

Besides payment, C-SAM has said its platform also can support offers, loyalty programs, mobile banking and bill payment.