The company has announced that Mastercard cardholders in Brazil can now send and receive money to and from friends and family through WhatsApp.
Mastercard debit cardholders with cards issued by Banco Inter, Itaú, Nubank, and Sicredi will be able to use the P2P WhatsApp service. The payments service on WhatsApp is enabled by Facebook Pay and processed by Facebook Pagamentos and Cielo.
The announcement comes after the Brazil Central Bank officially granted a Payment Initiator license to Facebook Pagamentos do Brasil and approved Mastercard's new transfer scheme. Additional banking partners are expected to join the programme soon.
The service leverages Mastercard Send to enable real-time payments for millions of WhatsApp users in Brazil who can now transfer money to friends and family in a secure manner. Mastercard Send is part of Mastercard’s multi-rail proposition, and it enables people and organisations to send and receive money across both card and real-time payments rails, providing increased choice, access, and financial control.
Every payment made on WhatsApp is protected by multiple layers of security. Mastercard tokenization solutions leverage the bank authentication to ensure the WhatsApp user is the card owner. Tokenization protects the cardholder's information by replacing the original 16-digit card number with a unique alternative number, or ‘token’, which is associated with the individual debit card number for each WhatsApp user and will not work elsewhere. Consumers create the token, then enter their Facebook Pay security PIN or device biometrics whenever they want to make a transaction.
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