- The duo aim to target developing markets in Southeast Asia and Africa.
- The Swoo tokens, which are user incentives and can be instantly transferred to other cryptos.
Mastercard, a payments behemoth, is collaborating with Swoo Pay, a mobile payments service that focuses on developing countries, to provide loyalty benefits in crypto.
Major payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard have long allowed users to earn digital currencies as a kind of incentive, similar to loyalty points. Not long ago, Mastercard boasted about a cryptocurrency reward program in partnership with Bakkt, a platform owned by the NYSE.
Visa had also teamed with the now-defunct BlockFi to create a credit card that allowed customers to earn bitcoin on purchases – efforts that failed for various reasons.
Strategic Expansion
Moreover, Mastercard and Swoo are teaming together to reach developing markets in Southeast Asia and Africa that have yet to be serviced by Google Pay. According to Filipp Shubin, co-founder of Swoo, this also involves communicating with people in nations where there is an abundance of reasonably priced Huawei devices.
Shubin stated:
“In many emerging countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Philippines and Indonesia, there are billions of users who have MasterCard and Visa cards, but don’t have access to Google Pay. Another problem concerns countries with big market share of Huawei smartphones, since due sanctions from the U.S. government, there are no Google services on top of these phones.”
Furthermore, the Swoo tokens, which are user incentives and can be instantly transferred to other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or USDC, will be ultimately backed by Mastercard, according to Shubin. Around 15,000 people took advantage of the five percent cryptocurrency rebate program in January as a trial run.
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