MasterCard plans e-commerce, mobile payment innovation portal
Financial services giant MasterCard will launch a portal later this year to help independent developers innovate e-commerce and mobile payment applications.
The portal, the first service from newly created MasterCard Labs, will be launched through the company's Open Application Programming Interfaces. The company announced May 25 that it is working on the portal.
MasterCard hopes it will give developers the technical expertise to test applications for online games, e-commerce websites, online wallets and payroll systems.
“We are committed to driving innovation for the rest of the payments industry and want to tap into the ingenuity of software developers around the globe to help create the next generation of game-changing payment applications,” said Joanne Trout, a spokesperson at MasterCard.
The portal will provide developers with technical documentation, software development kits, sample source code, reference guides and “virtual sandboxes” for testing new applications.
Trout added that that the portal, developed exclusively by MasterCard, could influence other developments in the payment application space.
“We are excited because by opening our previously proprietary payments and data services, people might come up with new ideas that may have not been previously considered or thought possible,” she said.