MasterCard Worldwide has hired an executive who has been integral in French wireless carrier Orange’s rollout of mobile-payment services, according to an online report by NFC Times.
Mung-Ki Woo, Orange’s vice president of electronic payments and transactions, is joining MasterCard to run the card-payments network’s mobile-payment and m-commerce business, the website reported, citing anonymous sources.
A MasterCard spokesperson declined to comment Jan. 14. An Orange spokesperson said she was unaware of any changes related to Woo’s employment.
Woo likely will report to Ed McLaughlin, MasterCard’s chief emerging payments officer, NFC Times said.
MasterCard in recent years has conducted a number of mobile- and contactless-payment trials worldwide, especially in the transit industry, and it has said it expects to put more resources behind such activities this year, including in the U.S.
At Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom SA, Woo was involved in several mobile-payment trials and in the development of several commercial services, including the deployment of a mobile-payments system based on Near Field Communication technology in Nice, France.
Several mobile-phone manufacturers are said to be incorporating NFC chips into their next-generation handsets. “We are strong believers in NFC,” Woo said during a panel discussion at the Cartes & IDentification conference and exhibition in Paris last month.
Woo acknowledged challenges to making mobile-payments services based on the technology because of the numerous parties that have a stake in such systems, including wireless carriers, banks and payments networks.
“It’s been taking much longer than all of us had anticipated,” Woo said. “It’s complex from a technology point of view, (and) it’s complex from a business ecosystem point of view.”
Visa inc. a year ago hired Bill Gajda to lead Visa’s mobile-payments initiatives. Gajda was chief commercial officer at the GSM Association, an international telecommunication organization that develops worldwide wireless standards for mobile communications (
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