Mastercard Debuts New Tool for Verifying Cardholders’ ID

Mastercard has a new way for issuers to confirm cardholders’ identifying information.

Dennis Gamiello, the company’s executive vice president for identity products and innovation, wrote in a blog post on Monday (Oct. 14) that it’s all thanks to a combination of new industry standards and Mastercard’s Identity Attribute Verification service.

The solutions use the technology behind a payment card to allow Mastercard partners to verify that a consumer meets the criteria for certain goods and services while protecting their privacy. It eliminates what can often be a cumbersome job: uploading documents like photo ID, proof of residency or passport.

“Let’s say you’ve just closed on your first home and want to order a bottle of champagne to celebrate,” wrote Gamiello.

“You’d place your item in your online basket as normal, and then be asked to confirm you’re old enough to make the purchase. In the background, Mastercard enables merchants to easily validate your age with your card issuer securely and without adding any unnecessary friction to your experience. Your card is enough.”

The project will initially focus on a few European countries, with plans to move into new markets next year.

“We’ll work with governments and organizations that are looking for seamless ways to verify identity attributes more accurately and confidently,” Gamiello wrote. “It’s by working with others that we will be able to scale attribute verification and continue to build trust in the digital world.”

In related news, PYMNTS spoke last week with Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard, about the use of tokenization to bolster payments security.

“We’ve needed to rethink, from the ground up, how we architect security,” Lambert said.

In a world where credentials are stored on billions of mobile devices and might be stored on millions of servers around the planet, “you have to assume that the bad actors and the hackers will get their hands on that data, no matter how tall and thick the firewalls you build,” he said.

At its core, tokenization involves replacing sensitive information with a digital, surrogate and non-sensitive “token,” he said. That replacement can stop fraudsters, as what they get their hands on is basically useless.

“There’s an analogy here,” PYMNTS wrote. “Think of the hotel keys of yore — actual keys with numbers on them — now replaced by electronic plastic wedges that can be deactivated when not in use.”