At Mastercard Connections, we power the future of retail

We can imagine a near future where you walk into a physical store and – if you choose to have this experience – it will be personalized just for you.

The seller already understands your style, likes and dislikes. The shelves offer real-time information on digital displays. The checkout isn’t really a checkout – you just walk out and your phone or smartwatch does the rest.

This scene – which we showcased at Mastercard Connections 2024, our North American customer event – ​​is part of our large-scale vision for the future of retail. This future will further connect our digital and physical worlds, allow people to shop in new ways, and bring artificial intelligence to more places. It’s retail that’s smarter, safer and more personalized.

Mastercard is at the forefront of these innovations, working to advance the digital economy, creating new payment solutions and offering a best-in-class suite of cybersecurity tools to protect people and businesses.

We also plan to realize our vision of more flexible and seamless trade for all, working closely with our partners around the world and with Connections. This includes retailers, fintechs, financial institutions and many others who make retail happen every day. This is what our conference is about.

Achieving this vision together with all our partners is the goal of our conference.

Retail renaissance

Over the last decade, the world of retail has changed more than perhaps at any other time in modern history. Shopping now includes biometric checkout, contactless payment and even pay in hand… where you just skip the checkout line altogether.

At the heart of all technological changes in retail are changes in consumer behavior and expectations. People want to have everything faster and at their fingertips.

To meet these expectations, Mastercard is implementing new products and services, offering seamless, intelligent and interactive shopping at home, in stores and online.

We see the future of retail being shaped by five key attributes identified in the latest issue of Mastercard Signals, our digital magazine that details the latest technologies:

• Digitized stores: Data overlays transform physical stores into intelligent, interactive environments that streamline the in-store shopping experience.
• Offscreen: Virtual reality and augmented reality bring the in-store shopping experience into people’s homes.
• Conversational Commerce: Artificial intelligence and communication technologies enable continuous, personalized dialogue between customers and brands.
• Hyper-personalized experiences: Advanced data analytics allows retailers to gain deeper insight into consumer preferences and behavior.
• Fashion forward: Fashion, beauty and apparel brands are pioneering experiential shopping, leveraging innovative, immersive experiences.

Personalized. Contextual. Sensitive. That’s what all these technologies and experiences are designed to do, to give shoppers exactly what they want. This benefits consumers as well as retailers and their sales.

Read more about the retail renaissance in the June 2024 issue of Mastercard Signals here.

Personalized contact thanks to AI solutions

And speaking of personalization, we think the era of one size fits all is over. One size fits… one. Thanks to new technology, we don’t have to settle down.

People expect more personalization in the e-commerce, online banking and shopping offers they receive. Mastercard’s latest digital tools – like our Shopping Muse personalization engine – deliver on these expectations, using data analytics, generational artificial intelligence and our global network to help people find what they need faster and easier than ever before.

The advent of an Internet curated and tailored specifically for you brings more people online. U.S. e-commerce sales rose 7.8% in May, accelerating growth from a year earlier, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures retail sales in stores and online across all forms of payment.

One-click checkout is coming

Another area waiting for a metamorphosis is the e-commerce checkout. In stores we can swipe, dip or tap. At home, we often fumble, squint and peck as we pull out our wallets and manually enter card details. This is annoying and time-consuming.

Therefore, from 2030 in Europe, we will eliminate manual card entry for online purchases. Entering these numbers is simply no longer necessary thanks to tokenization, which replaces card numbers with randomly generated ones, so the actual card information is never transmitted or stored by the merchant, making it a more secure and streamlined service for the consumer. It also reduces the security burden on merchants and banks and increases approval rates.

And it does not require any effort on the part of the consumer – tokenization is enabled by the issuing bank. Combined with Click to Pay, our online payments service and payment keys that leverage the ease of biometrics to authenticate users, this will create one-click payments as intuitive as a tap.

Cybersecurity enhanced by artificial intelligence

All of these smart features and ideas are great, but they are at risk without solid cybersecurity built around them.

We know that building trust in new technologies and digital commerce starts and ends with protecting personal data and being transparent with users.

That’s why Mastercard continues to make major investments in AI-powered security tools. Mastercard SafetyNet, one of our many cybersecurity tools, prevented over $20 billion in potential losses related to customer fraud and cybercrime on our network in 2023 alone.

We recently announced new advancements in our AI Gen cyber technology that allow us to double the speed of detecting infected cards. This helps banks block these cards quickly, saving customers the hassle.

Focusing even more on partnerships, a few weeks ago Mastercard launched its new European Cyber ​​Resilience Center in Waterloo, Belgium. This space connects to our Global Intelligence and Cyber ​​Center of Excellence in Vancouver, British Columbia, which we opened in 2022. Both centers are great places for our brightest minds in cyberspace to gather so they can connect in exercises , meetings and seminars with government officials, customers and partners so that we can learn from each other and constantly strengthen our cybersecurity walls.

Together with our partners and innovators at Mastercard Connections 2024, we are setting new standards in digital commerce. Our pioneering technologies, deep artificial intelligence integration, advanced cybersecurity measures and tokenization innovations transform shopping into an experience that is not only smarter, more connected and secure, but also highly tailored to the needs of each consumer.

Contact with the media: Raul Lopez, [email protected]