'India's level of ingenuity is infectious', says Mastercard's global CEO Michael Miebach

Mastercard's global CEO has set up its largest global facility in Maharashtra's Pune, which will be one of its seven tech hubs the world over, and said the multinational payments giant plans to 'double down' on India expansion.

In conversation with CNBC-TV18, Michael Miebach, Global CEO at Mastercard said he sees the scope for greater access to credit in India, as well as opportunities in commercial payments, given the size of the digital economy. Miebach also said that Mastercard sees passkeys and biometric authentication for e-commerce as key innovations in India to expand the market.

Mastercard assured further commitment to India and said that the company has invested $1 billion over last five years, including the latest tech hub - spread over half a million square meters - which Miebach said is 'state of the art'.

Michael Miebach said he finds India's level of ingenuity 'infectious', and sets India apart from the rest of the world. India's talent pool, scale of the economy, the ingenuity factor as well as culture, all have been factors that led Mastercard to increase its presence, said Miebach, adding that its India teams co-innovate with other tech hubs of the world.

Miebach believes the Indian tech stack has unlocked opportunities for 1.4 billion people, and helped the nation leapfrog to become a mobile-first market.

Mastercard has plans to replace security measures like passwords with biometric data such as fingerprints or face scans through tokenization, and is currently processing 1 billion such transactions every week. Mastercard plans to partner with banks and payment providers the world over to replace passwords with tokens based on users' biometric details. In India, this feature was introduced in August with PayU and Axis Bank.

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Miebach added that he finds India's fintech ecosystem to be very strong, and the card company too is a fintech - a very large one.

Mastercard has already said that it will tokenize all e-commerce transactions in Europe by the end of the decade. In June this year, Mastercard posted $3.3 billion in net income, and its global card count increased 7.2% on year to 3.42 billion.