Mastercard Inc. MA has extended its partnership with TransferWise, thereby broadening its global reach. With this expansion, cards can be issued in any market around the world where Mastercard is accepted and TransferWise is licensed.
The company’s tie-up with TransferWise dates back to 2018 when it issued its first TransferWise Debit Mastercard card in Europe. Ever since, more than one million such cards have been issued globally.
TransferWise currently partners with Mastercard across the EEA (European Economic Area), US, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Services in Japan are due to be launched later this year.
With this deal, Mastercard will get to issue TransferWise card in nearly all countries around the world.
TransferWise looks to replace the old-world international banking for multi-currency borderless account for its customer group of expats, freelancers, businesses and travellers. Its borderless account carries new features like direct debits and instant international payments.
TransferWise cards can be used on platforms, such as Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Pay, Fitbit (NYSE:FIT) and Garmin (NASDAQ:GRMN) Pay across the EEA.
Mastercard also provided its real time payment service Mastercard Send to the TransferWise account holders with the help of which they will be able to send money instantly to the company-issued cards in the European countries including Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Croatia and Russia.
In December 2019, another payment processor, Visa Inc (NYSE:V). V partnered with TransferWise and provided the latter with its Visa Direct service for real-time money transfer.
Partnering with digital providers like TransferWise, payment processors, namely Visa and Mastercard make it big in the digital remittances space, which continues to grab a bigger slice of the overall remittance space. The same is poised to rise from 35% (share of the overall remittance in 2019) to tap 54% by 2024.
Globalization is propelling cross-border payments digitally across industries. As the company widens its array of cross-border offerings across segments, forging more alliances with a wider spectrum of remittance providers could help better its performance level across borders, thereby accelerating growth.
Year to date, the stock has gained 11.8% compared with its industry’s growth of 4.3%.
Mastercard carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), currently. Better-ranked stocks include Envestnet (NYSE:ENV) Inc. ENV and International Money Express (NASDAQ:IMXI) Inc. IMXI, both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
Envestnet and International Money beat estimates in each of the four quarters with an average positive surprise of 14.28% and 33.33%, respectively.
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