Mastercard Launches Tokenized Card-Based Bill Pay Solution

Mastercard launched a new card-based bill-pay solution for merchants, acquirers, payment facilitators and payment service providers.

The new Bill Qkr is live and available globally, the company said in a Monday (Oct. 28) press release.

“With Mastercard Bill Qkr, we’re bringing our cutting-edge payment technologies together with our longstanding, global approach to collaboration,” Jennifer Marriner, executive vice president of global acceptance at Mastercard, said in the release. “This allows us to not only innovate in bill payments for our customers, but also to create better ways to transact and strengthen trust for the wider ecosystem.”

Bill Qkr features tokenization that allows cards to be securely stored on a merchant’s site for recurring payments, secure updates that keep future transactions flowing smoothly by providing a new token when the card expires, and Click to Pay that facilitates guest checkout, according to the release.

Billers can automatically submit ongoing invoices for fixed, recurring payments, and can streamline consumers’ use of saved payments credentials for bills that change month-to-month, the release said.

For merchants, the solution provides quick and guaranteed payment, eliminates the need for collections and enables higher approval rates, per the release.

The first strategic partners to use Bill Qkr operate in locations across Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America, according to the release. They include 2C2P, AXS, CardUp, Curacel and FitBank.

“This collaboration reflects our shared commitment to transforming outdated processes and delivering a solution that addresses both consumer and biller needs in a seamless, efficient manner,” FitBank Head of Innovation Manuel Steremberg said in the release.

Fifty-two percent of U.S. bill-payers encountered at least one pain point when paying bills in the past 90 days, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The One Stop Bill-Pay Playbook: Friction Within the Bill Payment Experience.”

The report found that 15% of these bill-payers pointed to a lack of payment options.

The report also found that a streamlined and simplified bill pay experience can reduce the likelihood of bill-payers skipping bill payments. For example, 23% of millennials said they will pay bills with the least payment friction first.