Credit card giant Mastercard hopes to offer technology-based payment solutions to government, business, and citizens as it opens an office in TT.

Mastercard Caribbean division manager Marcelo Tanguioni said this was the fourth office the company had opened in the Caribbean, the others being Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

He said Mastercard’s goal was to include a billion people worldwide in the formal economy, and with an average 50 per cent of the people in the region being either unbanked or underbanked, the Caribbean division was ready to focus on improving the lives of the people.

“It was surprising when I started managing the business here how the opportunities were still out there. All the stakeholders in the electronic payments environment were not necessarily putting the right energy, the right focus and investment in things. We had more mature markets that were growing at a faster pace than our markets here, and that was mind-boggling, as sometimes less mature markets have higher growth rates..."The first commitment I made to the organisation when I presented the plan to make those investments was that I was going to at least double the pace of growth in the region.”

TT and Eastern Caribbean country manager Dalton Fowles said while the company is best known for credit cards, it offered many more ways of making payments.

“We’ve evolved into what we call a multi-rail technology, so we’re looking at payments across all the rails.

"Traditionally we were about credit-card payments; now we’re doing account-to-account payments, with one of our subsidiaries, Vocalink, being one of the largest account-to-account payment networks across the world.

"We’re now partnering with a lot of banks and financial technology (fintech) companies to do cross-border payments; and we’re having a lot of success in crypto spaces as well.

"We’re also very good at security and compliance, as you’re not going to be successful in payments unless you can support the ecosystem.”

Tanguioni said the company was very proud of its security and compliance systems.

“Mastercard has never had any successful attacks against it. It’s one of the most targeted organisations in the world, with thousands of attacks attempted daily.

"We concentrate 60-70 per cent of personal card consumption in US, so having not-so-friendly countries getting access to that would shut down the country, and we’re in more than 200 countries. Security is at the top of our priorities because we know it’s a major problem and will be so for the foreseeable future.”

[caption id="attachment_972796" align="alignnone" width="660"] Mastercard Caribbean division manager Marcelo Tanguioni hopes to double its growth in the region. - AYANNA KINSALE[/caption]

Fowles said the company’s plans for the region would be affected by at least two factors: regulations and culture.

“In Europe they are moving to open banking, and while in our region regulations are catching up and a lot more regulators are creating that space for fintechs and issuers etc,