After years of touting its secondary brands, Cirrus and Maestro, for automated teller machine and point of sale transactions, MasterCard International has begun to encourage U.S. issuers to put only the MasterCard brand on most of its debit cards.
The Purchase, N.Y., company said it has no plans to eliminate the other two payment brands, which will continue to be used overseas, where they are better known to consumers than they are here.
Consumers will be able to use the cards, which will carry MasterCard's familiar interlocking-globes logo, at ATMs and at the point of sale to authorize both PIN and signature debit transactions.
MasterCard hopes the shift will eliminate uncertainty among consumers, who face an alphabet soup of logos and brands on the backs of their payment cards but often have little idea of what they represent.
Debit card issuers were initially informed of the shift in September, but the first public announcement came last week, when MasterCard announced that Washington Mutual Inc. had agreed to convert its debit portfolio. The Seattle thrift company had used Visa for its debit cards.
"We conducted research, and it's clear that … there's a fair amount of confusion with all of the brands that appear on the back of the card," said Richard G. Lyons Jr., MasterCard's senior vice president for North American debit strategy. MasterCard will now present itself as "the one brand you need to look for, regardless of the transaction you're trying to conduct," he said.
If no competing network marks appear on the back of a card, the MasterCard logo on the front will be enough to authorize all three types of debit transactions - ATM, PIN, and signature - Mr. Lyons said. If another logo, such as First Data Corp's Star or NYCE Corp.'s Pulse, is on the back, MasterCard's will also be on there.
The company expects that it will be three years before all its banks finish reissuing debit cards without the Cirrus and Maestro logos. (They will remain on the backs of PIN- and ATM-only cards issued in the United States.) Neither MasterCard nor private-label credit cards will be affected.
Edward Neumann, the managing director of Javelin Strategy and Research in Pleasanton, Calif., said MasterCard is probably emphasizing its main credit brand to establish more name recognition in debit.
He said "MasterCard" is considered not just a credit card but a payment brand, which can be more easily extended into the debit market. "They believe their main brand will have an easier time competing with Visa and First Data … for the PIN debit-processing business."
The Wamu agreement was the third large debit defection from Visa to MasterCard in three months.
In December, Associated Banc-Corp of Green Bay, Wis., announced that it would convert its 400,000 cards to MasterCard by this month. And in September, Bank of the West, a San Francisco unit of France's BNP Paribas, said it was converting its 600,000 debit cards to MasterCard.
Washington Mutual is the third-largest issuer of signature debit cards, at 9 million.
MasterCard made it clear that it was not scrapping Cirrus and Maestro, its ATM and POS brands, whose logos are similar to the MasterCard logo. "We will continue to have Maestro and Cirrus available for global use, so that non-U.S. cardholders coming to the U.S. will still see those brands," Mr. Lyons said.
Mr. Neumann said that though Maestro is not as well known in this country as Visa's equivalent POS network, Interlink, it is strong in Europe.
Industry experts applauded MasterCard's move.
Del Tonguette, a senior vice president for debit services with ICBA Bancard, the Arlington, Va., payment services subsidiary of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said he has been criticizing multiple-brand strategies for a decade.
"People have told me my predictions are accurate - just my timing is off," said Mr. Tonguette, who also ran the regional network GulfNet from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
Branding is rampant within banking, and such excesses can bewilder the public and carry heavy costs, he said. "You don't get a free checking account, you get a 'Four Star' checking account," Mr. Tonguette said. But "whenever you introduce a new mark, whether it's a new car or a banking product, it costs millions to generate awareness and educate the public on that new mark."
James L. Accomando, the president of Accomando Consulting Inc. of Fairfield Conn., said part of the logic behind creating multiple brand names is to distinguish between credit, ATM, and debit. But many consumers do not and need not understand the distinction, he said.
Rosetta Jones, a spokeswoman for Visa, would not say whether it plans to change the branding strategy for its ATM and PIN debit brands. In an e-mail, Ms. Jones said the San Francisco company "has always emphasized the Visa brand to consumers over Interlink or Plus."
