Mastercard has announced its partnership with Checkout.com to enable Careem Pay customers in the UAE area to access secure and fast near real-time payments. Following this partnership, Careem Pay will be enabled to integrate Mastercard Send in order to enable clients in the UAE to access and use near real-time payments within their Careem Pay wallets.

This will make the transactions quicker and more efficient, as the Careem application will be leveraged by customers to make payments, as well as to access daily services and benefits. The Mastercard Send solution is available in 108 countries around the globe and its integration with the Careem application will enable UAE-based customers to benefit from its features as well. This includes the possibility to make refunds from marketplaces, new P2P and international money transfer experiences, as well as disbursements for retail and delivery industries.

Moreover, Mastercard Send will be used to offer improved payment services to clients and to provide a secure and efficient customer experience during wallet top-ups. The partnership will also focus on improving the financial inclusion of Careem’s digital wallet growth and development in the market. Checkout.com leverages Mastercard Send, as well as its payment network in order to expand its wallet’s top-up solutions to multiple Mastercard cards in the UAE, with several use cases.

Mastercard’s recent partnerships and product launches US-based payment-processing corporation Mastercard had multiple collaborations and launches in the last couple of months, covering different geographic areas around the globe. In August 2023, the company announced its partnership with UAE-founded spend management fintech Qashio in order to launch corporate credit cards and to provide virtual issuance capabilities and offering in the region. Throughout the collaboration, the firms were set to focus on making the procedure of expense management cashless, secure, and flexible for businesses and corporates.

Qashio and Mastercard planned to expand access to commercial B2B services that were able to improve the way SMEs digitised and changed their operations. This followed a digital-first mindset and approach, as well as the UAE government's vision for the development of a robust digital economy. Earlier in the same month, Mastercard released a CBDC partner programme that was developed to encourage open discussions between enterprises around the emergence of CBDCs.

Its purpose was to provide a space for cryptocurrency stakeholders to enhance discussions on the importance of CBDCs, which represent the digital versions of traditional fiat currencies, such as USD. Mastercard also noted in the press release published at the time that 93% of central banks were involved already in some form of CBDC-related work. In this context, the discussions on cryptocurrencies aimed to potentially aid banks and financial institutions in avoiding errors and gaps in the procedure of implementing and incorporating CBDCs.

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