Mastercard offering tech and scale to vaccination passport projects

Mastercard is working to adapt its payments network to support a system that allows health care providers and other organizations to verify patients' coronavirus vaccination status.

Mastercard and the International Chamber of Commerce are partnering to integrate their digital health data management technology. The collaboration covers a wide range of expertise at the ICC and Mastercard, but would lean heavily on digital ID work at both organizations.

The ICC and Mastercard plan to engage with regulators, political leaders and business stakeholders to construct health passes based on standards for coronavirus test results and vaccination records.

Both firms will also work with the Good Health Pass Collaborative, a multinational organization that promotes sharing of coronavirus test results and vaccination statuses. The Good Health Pass Collaborative includes Hyperledger and IBM, and more than a dozen firms and collaboratives that work on blockchain and digital ID projects such as Evernym and Hyperledger. Hyperledger has worked with JPMorgan Chase and American Express on blockchain projects, and has advocated for interoperability for blockchain usage in financial services.

The ICC has developed technology that allows users to present medical records while shielding personal data, and has deployed with about a dozen airlines and immigration checkpoints in Spain and Singapore.

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Mastercard hopes to contribute ID, the card brand's digital authentication service, to the health project. Mastercard for years has worked with a variety of partners on digital interoperable authentication projects, including work with Microsoft on a federated identity initiative. Mastercard has tested digital ID technology at Glasgow and London Gatwick airports, giving it experience at travel portals.

"Because authentication is an inherent part of effective digital payments, I think the infrastructure that a card network like Mastercard has established could be well positioned to address the need for a real-time, verifiable vaccine passport," said Julie Conroy, research director at Aite Group. The vast amount of data that is stored on an EMV chip, for example, could be extended to a card-based vaccine passport which would leverage existing and well-established infrastructure, she added.

"It will take a player with a global network, experience with identity management and authentication, as well as data security and privacy to do this effectively at scale, and Mastercard ticks all of those boxes," Conroy said.

As a payment company, Mastercard operates across borders, manages risk management, manages risk for third-party relationships, and processes transactions between consumers and businesses. All these activities project to an immunity passport, even if indirectly.

"The technology used for payment processing is very compatible with the concept of providing a digital health pass," and the payment networks already provide what is essentially a digital financial pass, said Rick Oglesby, president of AZ Payments. "To create a digital health pass, they would just need to load the system with health data and repeat what would largely be the same processes."

But there would still be challenges in managing the actual health data, which is spread across a wide range of health care providers that aren’t set up to provide information for a digital health pass, Oglesby said. The users of the data such as those seeking health verification, like airports or airlines, are also not set up to process health passes, he said.

"So it’s the right technology, but the business challenges are still very large," Oglesby said. "The payment networks are in as good of a position as anyone to provide this service, so it makes lots of sense for them to pursue it."

Immunity passports have been floated as a way to enable the free flow of people since governments first restricted travel last spring. The concept is controversial for a variety of reasons, including concerns over structural feasibility, civil liberties, fraud and the potential for discrimination.

And since the response to the pandemic has been inconsistent in different jurisdictions, even within individual nations, there's also concern over varied levels of virus in circulation and different levels of vaccine deployment. Organizations such as the Good Heath Pass Collaborative hope standardization will address some of the inconsistency of Covid data. The ICC and Mastercard have argued digital passes would mitigate fraud risk for paper-based vaccine documentation.

The ICC did not return a request for comment by deadline.

"We see our role as an enabler, not unlike the way we currently enable consumers, merchants and financial institutions to transact and interact in a secure, convenient and trusted manner," Chris Reid, executive vice president of identity solutions at Mastercard, said in an email. "Enabling people to prove their identity seamlessly and securely, in both the digital and physical worlds, has a range of benefits and it’s why we’ve placed such great emphasis on developing a global, interoperable solution via our digital identity service."

Both the ICC and Mastercard have incentives to further health passes since an increase in travel would boost business for the ICC and Mastercard's constituencies. The pandemic has hit the travel industry particularly hard. Mastercard and Visa have both said there's pent-up demand for travel when restrictions lift, but have not been able to provide investors with detailed projections.

"Mastercard has been looking to leverage its trusted brand and core capabilities, such as developing and managing large-scale networks, or exchanging messages at speed, in areas beyond payments, such as open banking or identity infrastructure," said Zil Bareisis, a senior analyst at Celent. "A digital health pass can be seen as a set of identity attributes, and while it’s different to payments, the concepts of 'issuing' and 'authorization' are very much applicable."