Mastercard opens its blockchain APIs for B2B payment solutions

Blockchain technology is all the rage right now, but slowly it’s becoming less of a fad and a more commonplace solution for big technology and financial firms. The latest to adopt it wholeheartedly is Mastercard.

Already using the technology in-house, the company today announced that it will open up its blockchain APIs to developers looking to build solutions on top of its product.

“Mastercard’s blockchain solution provides a new way for consumers, businesses and banks to transact and is key to the company’s strategy to provide payment solutions that meet every need of financial institutions and their end-customers,” the company noted in a press release.

‘Mastercard’s blockchain solution provides a new way for consumers, businesses and banks to transact‘

The financial company confirmed that its blockchain will initially target the enterprise and B2B space “to address challenges of speed, transparency and costs in cross-border payments“.

Based on its use cases, Mastercard claims that the technology can be used to keep track of goods, facilitate cardless payments, or monitor a vehicle’s service history. The latter example is notably interesting:

Using the privacy feature of the Mastercard Blockchain, enable vehicle owners and authorised dealers to share vehicle information with each other privately in order to facilitate the payment. For example, an owner gets their car serviced, the garage writes details about the service (odometer reading, service type) to the Blockchain. With the Mastercard Blockchain, only the participating parties can see these details. When ownership is transferred to a new party, they can now see the entire service history.

Ken Moore, Mastercard Labs’ executive VP called the technology “safe, secure auditable, and easy to scale”.

“When it comes to payments, we want to provide choice and flexibility to our partners where they are able to seamlessly use both our existing and new payment rails based on the needs and requirements of their customers,” he added.

The Mastercard blockchain APIs can be accessed here.