Mastercard’s Vice President for New Product Development and Innovation, Harold Bossé, is optimistic about the mass adoption of crypto, although challenges still need to be overcome.
Summary
- Mastercard’s Harold Bossé: “Bitcoin mass adoption will happen sooner rather than later”
- Mastercard: several challenges must be overcome
- Embracing fintech innovation
Mastercard’s Harold Bossé: “Bitcoin mass adoption will happen sooner rather than later”
During a webinar in Avalanche’s “Powering Business with Blockchain” series on Tuesday, Harold Bossé, Mastercard‘s Vice President of New Product Development and Innovation, shared his thoughts on the crypto sector
“BREAKING: Bitcoin mass adoption will happen sooner rather than later – MasterCard”.
Bossé noted that today there are already millions of people consuming and sending cryptocurrencies worldwide. In this regard, he also stated:
“They are early adopters and new adopters, but we have switched toward mass markets, that will be a very important aspect for financial institutions to move into the space”.
Basically, the Vice President of Mastercard argues that the current phase of crypto and blockchain technology adoption is still in its infancy, i.e. at that early or new adopter stage, and that very soon it will be possible to really talk about mainstream.
Mastercard: several challenges must be overcome
Looking at the current state of crypto adoption, Bossé also noted that there are still several challenges to overcome such as lack of understanding from senior management, business motivations related to scalability, cost and speed, and regulatory concerns.
Not only that, Bossé argues that only when startups start thinking and looking at ideas that do not exist today, and create businesses enabled by these emerging technologies, then it will be possible to fully experience the mainstream adoption of crypto.
In this regard, here is Amazon’s comparison to the internet to describe what startups should do with crypto:
“Think about the advent of the internet; no one was thinking that Amazon could even be a concept you need the internet for Amazon to work. We’re in the same situation: How do we transform the lives of people and go into demographics or groups of people who don’t really think about blockchain first but think about their business problems?”
Embracing fintech innovation
Mastercard has always distinguished itself by embracing fintech innovation through crypto, venturing into the industry with cryptocurrency-backed credit services, including the recent registration of the NFT and Metaverse brands.
Not only that, in the middle of last February, the payments giant had announced the launch of a new payments-focused consultancy service covering Open Banking, Open Data, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Currencies, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG).
In addition, through a collaboration with Amber, Bitkub and CoinJar, Mastercard had started to make Bitcoin and crypto payments possible with physical or digital cards in Asia Pacific.
