IMGCAP(1)]
MasterCard Inc. is trying to prime the market for mobile financial services by offering contactless payments stickers consumers can attach to their wireless handsets. The announcement follows one last week by Visa Inc. and First Data Corp., which is planning a national launch later this year of its contactless reloadable device known as Go-Tag (CardLine, 3/26). MasterCard announced today it is offering its sticker with Blaze Mobile Inc., an Alameda, Calif.-based payments-technology company that also makes a "mobile wallet" application. The strategy would pave the way for handsets containing integrated Near Field Communication capabilities, says Simon Pugh, head of MasterCard's worldwide global center of mobile excellence. "This is the interim solution until NFC becomes real," he says. Michelle Fisher, Blaze Mobile CEO and founder, says the endorsement of the No. 2 card brand would help boost the fledgling payment format. "Having MasterCard behind this initiative is going to help jumpstart mobile payments," she says. The product, the Blaze Mobile MasterCard PayPass mobile payment sticker, essentially is a prepaid account backed by MetaBank, a unit of Meta Financial Group Inc. of Storm Lake, Iowa. It comes with a conventional magnetic stripe card as well. Blaze Mobile also is in discussions with other banks about issuing the sticker, Fisher says. Neither MasterCard nor Blaze would say whether the sticker would be the subject of one of the card company's signature "Priceless" commercials, although a spokesperson says MasterCard has featured PayPass in its advertising. The sticker integrates with the Blaze Mobile Wallet, announced in April 2008, to provide transaction alerts and marketing offers to the user's handset. The wallet can access accounts at more than 8,000 financial institutions that offer online access, including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., Fisher says. Nick Holland, senior analyst at the research and advisory firm Aite Group LLC of Boston, says while the sticker technology itself is fairly unsophisticated, it introduces consumers to using the mobile handset as a payment device. "To its credit, it is a first step in building that pattern of behavior by the end user," he says.
