By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 8th, 2024
Based on a survey, Mastercard has discovered that a number of prospective crypto investors will be more willing to accelerate their engagements in the space if the financial services are being offered by their banking institutions.
American multinational financial services provider, Mastercard Inc (NYSE: MA) is on track to launch a program in the first quarter of next year as it seeks avenues to enable banks to offer crypto services to their customers. As reported by CNBC, the program to support the banking embrace of crypto is billed to be announced on Monday and will see the firm act as a bridge between Paxos and the financial institutions.
As a major payment service provider, Mastercard has always played a frontline role in the global adoption of crypto, as the company sees the innovation as a major one to revamp the future of financial technology. In this latest pursuit, the company said it wants to act in a capacity whereby it can help firms looking to get into crypto to overcome the compliance and security bottlenecks associated with the nascent asset class.
Based on a survey, Mastercard has discovered that a number of prospective crypto investors will be more willing to accelerate their engagements in the space if the financial services are being offered by their banking institutions. On their part, the banks have been cautious with respect to floating mainstream crypto services as the regulatory aspect of the industry is not fully developed yet.
“There’s a lot of consumers out there that are really interested in this, and intrigued by crypto, but would feel a lot more confident if those services were offered by their financial institutions,” Mastercard’s chief digital officer, Jorn Lambert, told CNBC in an interview. “It’s a little scary to some people still.”
Notably, the top banking firms in the US and around the world are warming up to the idea of digital currencies, and some are even floating custody services as in the case of Bank of New York Mellon Corp (NYSE: BK).
Mastercard Web3.0 Pursuit is Post Crypto Winter
There has been a lot of turmoil in the digital currency ecosystem to date with bankruptcies of major crypto firms, and the exodus of executives from established players in the industry. With this event generally known as the crypto winter, Mastercard Inc’s business outlook far exceeds the current pains or unsettlement being experienced across the board.
“It would be shortsighted to think that a little bit of a crypto winter heralds the end of it — we don’t see that,” he said. “As regulation comes in, there is going to be a higher degree of security available to the crypto platforms and we’ll see a lot of the current issues getting resolved in the quarters in the years to come.”
Mastercard has inked many partnerships in the industry to date and with more underway, highlighting signs that the company’s positioning is one that cannot be displaced even with the decentralization narrative that is being peddled by proponents of the technology underpinning the broader crypto and Web3.0 world.
