Payments giant Mastercard today announced Merchant Cloud, a next-generation payments platform designed to unify services and help businesses navigate the complexities of global commerce. The scheme-agnostic platform offers a single point of entry to a dynamic suite of services that supports the entire merchant value chain, including acquirers, Payment Service Providers (PSPs), Payment Facilitators (PayFacs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and merchants.
Merchant Cloud is engineered to simplify global expansion and deliver enhanced experiences for end users by providing key solutions for credential tokenization, guest checkout, fraud protection, and approval rate optimization. It also incorporates gateway services such as omnichannel experiences, efficient transaction routing, and deep data insights.
AI-driven optimisation and security
The new platform is designed to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline shopping and improve transaction success rates. Mastercard’s latest offering within the platform, the Payment Optimization Platform (POP), utilises the network’s intelligence and will soon use AI to provide optimal authorisation messages and deliver insights that drive more approvals.
Merchant Cloud also places a strong emphasis on security and is built to support the future of digital commerce, including agent-driven payments. The platform includes advanced cyber, identity, and AI fraud monitoring tools from Mastercard’s Security Solutions, which are designed to identify fraudulent merchants and provide risk scores to acquirers and PSPs. A dedicated Transaction Risk API provides payment operations teams with actionable insights to manage global fraud.
Gaurang Shah, executive vice president, global acceptance & merchant solutions at Mastercard, stated that Merchant Cloud fundamentally simplifies commerce. “With Mastercard Merchant Cloud, commerce is truly simplified through a unified, scalable, secure, and open infrastructure — one that not only supports the needs of merchant partners today with data, services and insights, but is also designed to anticipate the future of digital and agent-driven commerce,” Shah commented.
Global reach, unified access
The new unified acceptance platform is designed to simplify growth for all partners by providing streamlined access to its dynamic, modular set of services. With worldwide connectivity to over 240 acquirers and support for more than 35 payment types (including alternative payment methods, global wallets, and domestic schemes), merchant partners can access services that boost acceptance of more transaction types, driving additional sales and enhancing consumer choice.
The platform’s focus on providing a simplified, secure, and technologically advanced infrastructure aims to support businesses globally, allowing them to tailor a suite of services to improve optimisation performance and ensure compliance with the latest payments protocols.
