MasterCard Partners with Obopay to Offer Industry-leading Person-to-Person Mobile Payment Service

MasterCard MoneySend™ will be offered to MasterCard issuing banks through the Obopay mobile payment service
Purchase, NY. - MasterCard today announced an agreement with Obopay, Inc. to offer a fully-integrated on-demand person-to-person mobile payment service in the United States. The service, offered via MasterCard MoneySend, will give new and existing MasterCard issuing customers the ability to provide an innovative mobile payments service to their MasterCard cardholders on all credit, debit and prepaid MasterCard-branded products.

The announcement of this service comes at a time when consumers are increasingly seeking to use their mobile phones to streamline and simplify their day-to-day activities, including banking and payment transactions. TowerGroup estimates that in the United States, adoption of consumer mobile banking has quintupled in the past 12 months from 1.1 million active users in 2007 to 5.7 million active users today. As mobile consumers become increasingly comfortable with converging technologies on their mobile devices, the opportunity to develop mobile payments systems will continue to grow. The new Mobile MasterCard MoneySend Person-to-Person service will give participants the freedom and flexibility to directly, easily and securely send and receive funds through any registered cardholder’s mobile phone. The service will make mobile money transfer seamless for millions of consumers. Participants will use mobile numbers to send and receive funds, keeping their payment account numbers private.

“Our strong partnership with Obopay takes the development of the mobile person-to-person payments framework to the next level,” said Art Kranzley, Chief Emerging Technology Officer, MasterCard Worldwide. “The power and breadth of the MasterCard network combined with the account relationships of MasterCard issuers and Obopay’s mobile payment technology enable us to offer valuable new services for consumers throughout the U.S., allowing consumers to easily transfer funds to their friends and families. We will launch this new service with our financial institution customers and Obopay in the near future.”

Kranzley also noted, “The development of this service underscores our commitment to driving commerce and industry innovation. We will continue to develop solutions that combine payments and communications onto ‘anywhere,’ ‘anytime’ consumer devices that provide a positive business model for all parties in the mobile payments value chain.”

“Obopay is proud to establish this partnership with MasterCard, and we look forward to developing a service that will build on MasterCard’s history of delivering mobile services to their cardholders” said Obopay President, U.S.-based Operations, Gregory Holmes. “With more consumers clamoring for services that fit their mobile lifestyles, we’re confident that MasterCard cardholders will welcome the option of quickly and easily sending money to other cardholders via mobile phone.”

Driving Innovation in the Payments Industry
The U.S. is an important market for MasterCard innovation. The highly developed marketplace and sophisticated consumer preferences demand the most advanced payments solutions. MasterCard’s focus on products and services that are directly related to payments, such as MasterCard® PayPass™ will propel continued innovation for the industry in the mobile space delivering value for all parties in the value chain including financial institutions, operators, merchants and consumers.

With over 28 million MasterCard PayPass cards and devices in use at more than 109,000 merchant locations worldwide, and multiple in-market mobile PayPass trials taking place in the U.S. and globally, MasterCard is committed to delivering fast, convenient and secure transaction experiences for consumers at the point of interaction.