Developer Program Expands Partnership to Power Payments in Wearables

Barcelona, Spain – February 22, 2016 – Coin today announced a developer program for accelerating the integration of payments into wearables. The program will enable access to the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service (MDES) to securely digitize MasterCard payment credentials and further reduce the barrier to entry for device manufacturers.

The program, compatible with a range of wearables such as fitness bands, smart watches and jewelry, is online at http://developer.onlycoin.com. Approved developers will have access to Coin’s proprietary technology for enabling payments in a scalable way, and later this year, to digitized MasterCard credentials though Coin’s integration with MDES. This expands upon the companies’ previously announced partnership, underscoring the companies’ commitment to make it as simple as possible for wearables makers to enable payments.

The research firm Tractica forecasts that the volume of wearable payment transactions will grow to $501 billion by 2020. The anticipated growth is fueled by consumers’ demand and expectation that wearables will shift from single-use to multi-purpose products. For example, 46% of 31-40 year olds prefer to bank with wearables according to Intelligent Environment’s survey of 2000 people.

But integrating payments functionality has historically been incredibly costly, complex and slow. It can take several million dollars just to set up the requisite backend services. As Coin has already gone through the certification process, the developer program includes quick access to MDES, reducing vital time-to-market.

The developer program has no upfront infrastructure fees for wearables makers (beyond the nominal cost of hardware) and offers a free tier for early stage companies building a customer base. For products that have wider adoption, the Coin model is based on a product engagement basis so developers only get charged when users are engaging with payments on the wearable device. This aligns the success of MasterCard, Coin and developer program participants. The developer program provides a transparent process for fast access to tools and documentation – allowing device manufacturers to benefit from both MasterCard’s and Coin’s respective domain expertise.

“We’ve long recognized the tremendous potential developers have to shape the future of commerce, and we have worked hard to provide the building blocks to help fuel this innovation. We’re excited to extend our partnership with Coin to enable developers to leverage the MDES platform and the MasterCard Digital Enablement Express program to rapidly enhance their creations and to stand out in today’s device-driven world,” said Sherri Haymond, senior vice president, Digital Payments & Labs at MasterCard.

“Signing up for the Coin developer program gives wearables manufacturers transparent access to a turnkey solution,” said Kanishk Parashar, CEO and Co-Founder of Coin. “The program makes commerce accessible to device makers as payments on wearables become table stakes. We are confident that our miniaturized and secure payment technology, combined with MasterCard’s tokenization, will benefit our wearables partners with increased engagement of their products.”

Companies can visit the Coin developer program site to register for the program and request more information.

About MasterCard

MasterCard (NYSE: MA), http://www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry. We operate the world’s fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. MasterCard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone. Follow us on Twitter @MasterCardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

About Coin

Coin is a consumer electronics and financial technology company bringing simplicity and security to payments. With Coin’s developer platform, wearables makers can seamlessly integrate secure payments into their devices (e.g. fitness trackers, smart watches and jewelry). Coin gives consumers the freedom to pay how, when and where they want by reducing the number of cards carried. Follow us on Twitter @coin or learn more about the Coin developer program at http://developer.onlycoin.com.

Media Contacts

Brian Gendron, MasterCard

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Tony Pham, Coin

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Partnership Provides More Options for Consumers to Shop Securely Using Connected Fashionable and Functional Accessories

BARCELONA – FEBRUARY 22, 2016 –Today at Mobile World Congress, MasterCard and WISeKey announced a partnership to enable contactless payments on select luxury brand watches and wearables. WISeKey currently works with an extensive list of premium watch manufacturers, including Hublot and Bulgari, which use WISeKey’s patented security software, WIS.WATCH.

The partnership adds new devices and brands to ongoing MasterCard programs that bring payments to any consumer gadget, accessory or wearable – from fitness bands to refrigerators.

“Our collaboration with WISeKey is a great example of how payments functionality can deliver transformative more value for a variety of device manufacturers, and create safe and convenient shopping experiences for their consumers,” said Sherri Haymond, senior vice president, Digital Payments and Labs, MasterCard. “Together, we are using our collective innovative technology and expertise to transform the way people pay for things.”

With the companies’ shared commitment to advance payments security in both the physical and digital worlds, MasterCard will integrate its payments technology with WISeKey’s Cryptographic Root of Trust for IoT and NFCTrusted© technology solutions, providing consumers with the freedom to securely shop using their favorite watch or wearable.

“Working together, WISeKey and MasterCard will open the door to additional e-commerce and marketing opportunities for luxury wearable device and watch manufacturers. The potential for improved communication with customers can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat business,” said Carlos Moreira, CEO of WISeKey.

Download our Mobile World Congress app or find a complete list of MasterCard news announcements from the conference in our Digital Press Kit. Follow us @MasterCardNews or using the hashtag #WhatsNext to join the conversation.

About MasterCard

MasterCard (NYSE: MA), http://www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry. We operate the world’s fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. MasterCard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone. Follow us on Twitter @MasterCardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

About WISeKey

WISeKey is a leading global digital security solutions company. Working at the forefront of information cybersecurity, identity management, and mobile software services, WISeKey’s mission is to facilitate the global growth of secure electronic transactions by providing individuals, businesses, and governments with advanced technology and services that authenticate and protect digital identity across the full spectrum of personal, business and administrative transactions online. WISeKey, established in Geneva, Switzerland in 1999, (http://www.wisekey.com/), is a World Economic Forum Global Growth Company. Follow WISeKey on Twitter @wisekey, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram

Media Contacts

Marisa Grimes

MasterCard

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Youmna Abisaleh

WISeKey

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Lena Cati

WISeKey Investor Relations

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Today we’re announcing new advances in our long-term efforts to build the future of virtual reality.

Mobile VR grows: 1m hours of video watched

Virtual reality is already something people can touch and feel with the Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus, which is in stores now. Gear VR is the best mobile VR experience in the world because it combines the leading VR software, built by Facebook’s Oculus team, with world-class mobile hardware, built by Samsung. Since Gear VR launched in November 2015, the response has been incredibly strong: More than 200 games and apps are now available for the platform in the Oculus store, and people have already watched more than a million hours of video in Gear VR.

Dynamic streaming coming to mobile VR

We’ve also been developing new technology that will make video in virtual reality work even better. 360 video on Facebook is the first step — it allows you to look around and feel like you’re present while watching a video, whether it’s surfing in Tahiti or exploring the surface of Mars. Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily. And we’ve only just begun to explore the possibilities with this format.

Today, we’re taking an important step toward improving 360 video in VR: Our powerful dynamic streaming technology for 360 video is coming to Gear VR. It’s a more efficient way of delivering 360 videos, showing only the pixels you’re actually looking at in the highest quality, instead of delivering the entire 360 video in high resolution. To make this work, we create dozens of variants for every 360 video that gets uploaded to Facebook, each tailored to a specific viewing angle, and then as you watch the video, we rapidly adjust which variant we display based on where you’re looking. By doing this, we’ve quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x — so videos look clearer and play faster. We’re excited to bring this to Gear VR in the next few weeks. To learn more, read the blog post from our recent Video @Scale event where we previewed this technology.

Investing in social VR

As we continue to make big breakthroughs in the technology behind VR, we’re also investing in efforts to explore immersive new VR experiences that will help people connect and share. We’ve already helped people connect in a wide variety of ways on mobile devices — ranging from Facebook and Instagram to Messenger and WhatsApp — and now we want to apply that same approach to the new medium of VR. In the future, VR will enable even more types of connection — like the ability for friends who live in different parts of the world to spend time together and feel like they’re really there with each other.

We’ve created a Social VR team at Facebook focused entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR. This team will explore how people can connect and share using today’s VR technology, as well as long-term possibilites as VR evolves into an increasingly important computing platform. They’ll will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms.

Our work in VR is still early, and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that we still need to solve. But we’re encouraged by our progress to date, and we’re excited to continue building VR technology that gives people new ways to connect and share.

By Jay Parikh, Global Head of Engineering and Infrastructure

Today we announced the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an engineering-focused initiative that is bringing operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators, and other technology companies together to collaborate on the development of new technologies and reimagine traditional approaches to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure.

Every day, more people and more devices around the world are coming online, and it’s becoming easier to share data-intensive experiences like video and virtual reality. Scaling traditional telecom infrastructure to meet this global data challenge is not moving as fast as people need it to. We know there isn’t a single solution for this, and no one company can tackle the problem alone. Driving a faster pace of innovation in telecom infrastructure is necessary to meet these new technology challenges and to unlock new opportunities for everyone in the ecosystem.

We know from our experience with the Open Compute Project that the best way to accelerate the pace of innovation is for companies to collaborate and to work in the open. To kick-start this work, TIP members such as Facebook, Intel, and Nokia have pledged to contribute an initial suite of reference designs, while other members such as operators Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom will help define and deploy the technology as it fits their needs.

TIP members will work together to contribute designs in three areas — access, backhaul, and core and management — applying the Open Compute Project models of openness and disaggregation as methods of spurring innovation. In what is a traditionally closed system, component pieces will be unbundled, affording operators more flexibility in building networks. This will result in significant gains in cost and operational efficiency for both rural and urban deployments. As the effort progresses, TIP members will work together to accelerate development of technologies like 5G that will pave the way for better connectivity and richer services.

To illustrate the advantages of testing new approaches to connectivity, Facebook, in collaboration with Globe, recently launched a pilot deployment based on TIP principles to connect a small village in the Philippines that previously did not have cellular coverage. In addition, EE is planning to work as part of TIP to pilot a community-run 4G coverage solution that can withstand the challenges presented by the remote environment of the Scottish Highlands to connect unconnected communities. Testing new technologies and approaches and sharing what we learn with the rest of the industry will enable operators to adopt new models with full confidence that they will be sustainable.

Working to enable operators and the broader telecom industry to be more flexible, innovative, and efficient is important for expanding connectivity. For Facebook, TIP is a new investment that ties into our other connectivity efforts already under way through Internet.org.

We’re excited to be working with the companies that have already joined TIP and are looking forward to more joining in the future — everyone in the industry is welcome. To learn more about TIP and how to participate, go to telecominfraproject.com.

State of Connectivity 2015: A Report on Global Internet Access, the second annual study by Facebook, takes a close look at the current state of global internet connectivity, how it has changed since 2014 and how we can use the data identified to generate new insights.

At the end of 2015, estimates showed that 3.2 billion people were online. This increase (up from 3 billion in 2014) is partly attributed to more affordable data and rising global incomes in 2014. Over the past 10 years, connectivity increased by approximately 200 to 300 million people per year.

While this is positive news in terms of growth, it also means that globally, 4.1 billion people were still not internet users in 2015 (43 percent).

The four key barriers to internet access include:

In order to address the barriers to connectivity, corporations, governments, NGOs and non-profits need to work together to continue gathering more accurate data on the state of global connectivity, and develop global standards for collecting, reporting, and distributing this data.

As one example, Facebook is collaborating with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University to produce detailed maps showing the population distribution of 20 countries. These maps were created using new machine learning techniques and show the most accurate estimates of population distribution and settlements available to date.

Figure 1A: Existing Population Distribution (Gridded Population of the World Dataset (GPW) of a coastal region in Kenya.

Figure 1B: New Facebook estimates of population distribution based on processing of third party satellite images, of the same region shown in figure 1A.

This data will give us a greater understanding of how populations are dispersed, so governments and others can prioritize investments in infrastructure, from transportation to healthcare and education. It can also help rapid response times during emergencies and other disasters and inform our understanding of the ecological impact of growth.

Population distribution data will also help guide Facebook’s Connectivity Lab. It will help identify the types of projects to prioritize and support target developments. Later this year, Facebook will open source the detailed population estimates.

Through the development of reports like the State of Connectivity, along with wider collaboration with industry and beyond, we hope to address the chief barriers to access, and soon, close the digital divide.

Read the full State of Connectivity report here.

Read more about Data-Assisted Population Distribution Mapping here and here.

Digital Payments Extend Beyond the Phone as Use of Connected Devices Grows

To tweet this news, copy and paste (http://news.mstr.cd/1Q6rMpm) to your Twitter handle with the hashtags #WhatsNext and #MWC16

PURCHASE, NY – February 21, 2016 – In 2015, consumers embraced the increasing choice of digital payments options available to them, moving beyond the simple question of “what’s next?” Across the globe, cardholders are asking banks and retailers to provide real-life, ready-to-use mobile payments options, proven by social media comments more than doubling in just one year.

These insights lead the findings from the fourth annual MasterCard Mobile Payments Study, developed in partnership with PRIME Research. The study tracked 2 million global social media posts about mobile payments across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Forums, Google+ and YouTube, up from 85,000 posts in 2012.

Supporting this increased interest was a continued positive sentiment about mobile payments technology, continuing a two-year trend.

“As more choices are made available to them, the conversation has evolved and consumers seem to be fully embracing the next generation of payments,” said Marcy Cohen, vice president of digital communications at MasterCard.

Expanding Payment Options

Digital wallets including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay and MasterPass dominated – 97 percent – of total mobile payments conversations in 2015, centered on product launches, service improvements and how users are evaluating them. Outside of digital wallet discussions, contactless cards (47 percent) drove conversations, followed by biometrics (33 percent), personal payments (14 percent) and wearables (6 percent).

Conversations about contactless cards focused around opening up global acceptance at public transit systems including those in London and St. Petersburg as well as availability at major sporting events around the world.

Mentions of wearables in the last quarter of 2015 were more than 30 times higher than in the first quarter of the year.

Conversations Increased Globally

Digital wallets are gaining traction in social conversations worldwide. Within the last year there was an increase in every region including:  Asia Pacific (+159%), Europe (+144%), Latin America and the Caribbean (+20%), Middle East and Africa (+111%) and North America (+519%).

Security Remains Key

The safety and security of mobile payments continues to drive conversations, as more consumers continue to take a positive or neutral view of the services being offered to them (94 percent). This reflects a three percentage point increase over last year and 24 points above the initial 2012 study.

In 2015, the end of passwords and biometrics were among the most engaging topics in 2015, reflected in social conversations in 163 countries around the world. Fingerprint and electrocardiogram (ECG) payments-related technology became an engaging topic for users throughout the year, while facial recognition (“Selfie Pay”) remained a top driver (55%) of biometrics-focused conversation.

Download our Mobile World Congress app or find a complete list of MasterCard news announcements from the conference in our Digital Press Kit. Follow us @MasterCardNews or using the hashtag #WhatsNext to join the conversation.

About the Study 

MasterCard, in partnership with PRIME Research, conducted its fourth annual Mobile Payments Study, designed to identify expanding conversations on new ways to pay. Mining more than 2 million social media posts over the past year across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Forums, Google+ and YouTube, the study covers unique audience discussions from 61 markets across the globe.

Reflecting growing interest in new ways to pay, this year’s study analyzed more than 1.6 million original posts, along with more than 433,000 reposts, which included both consumer commentary and news-driven conversations. Using PRIME’s proprietary human-based social media analytics methods and technology, the research firm identified key trends within new payments methods, including: biometrics, contactless cards, digital wallets, personal payments and wearable devices.

The resulting report reflects insights into new mobile payments product and category trends across regions and countries.

About MasterCard 

MasterCard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry. We operate the world’s fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. MasterCard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone. Follow us on Twitter @MasterCardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

Media Contact

Rebecca Kaufman

MasterCard

+1-914-261-0994

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