‘Mastercard Move’ to focus on SMEs, education cross-border payments

Mastercard, through its latest offering ‘Mastercard Move’, is set to focus on Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and student communities across India to facilitate safer and faster cross-border payments.

Mastercard Move is expected to be introduced soon in India to solve cross-border money movement problems. “We are very focused on education payment and in how SMEs get paid,” said Pratik Khowala, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Transfer Solutions Mastercard.

“Globally it is a big piece of business that we want to focus on in India. We want to bring the same UPI experience to cross-border payments and that is my vision. It might not happen tomorrow, but it will happen,” he emphasised.

Mastercard Move is more like domestic money movement as well as cross-border movement. It reaches 200 countries and territories, connecting more than 17 billion endpoints across accounts, cards, wallets, and cash. It also supports 150 currencies.

This global reach enables the company to serve both emerging and established markets across a wide range of use cases more effectively than anyone else.

The product offers multi-rail money transfers that address a variety of needs, including P2P transfers, me‑to‑me transfers, disbursements (B2P), commercial payments (B2B), government payments (G2B/G2P), and bill payments (P2B).

Through partnerships with organisations like Infosys, Mastercard is embedding Mastercard Move into the platforms used by banks and fintechs, making it easier for them to access our services through pre‑integrated APIs.

It is also enhancing value‑added services such as Verification of Payee and SEPA mandate verification to support interoperability and security.

The company plans to bring direct connectivity and its growth in bringing money to India has been over 50%. “The trade [in India} has increased significantly in last 10 years and there are around 1.8 trillion of trade growing at 10% every year,” said Mr. Khowala.  

Stating that payment today happens through a correspondent banking system where Indian banks are not connected overseas, he said the trade payment receipt system lacks transparency as one does not know when the money would arrive. “It’s high cost because there are three to four intermediaries to get the money,” he pointed out. 

He said students who go out of India to study need to make payment to their universities and currently the payment process is very cumbersome. “Because universities do not get payment on time, they just throw the student out. Today student payments go through the same correspondent banking network and that is one area which we want to solve,” he added.

Mr. Khowala said SMEs would be empowered to bill their overseas buyers in Dollars or in Euros not in Rupee. “We want to give SMEs the capability to receive money in Dollars & Euros because if they can collect money in Dollars and they can hold those Dollars overseas, they can use the same Dollars to spend money locally. That will save them a huge amount of foreign exchange conversion cost. When the payment happens in a domestic real time environment, it is much faster,” he said.

“Our efforts would be ensure that they get their money in India as fast and as cheap as possible,” he said adding even the banks are today finding it very expensive to serve those SMEs because they don’t have the right platform to serve. We believe we are very well positioned to solve the problem,” he emphasised.

“We are in a very good position as Mastercard to solve the money movement problem globally and in India as we have the largest reach,” he said. 

On his management philosophy, the New York-based Mr. Khowala said he always encourages people to get out of their comfort zones and do something different even if they may fail. “If you fail, it’s failure that is a way to learn something new.”