Mastercard partners with Paycode to increase access to financial services

Mastercard has partnered with African fintech and Start Path company Paycode to provide both company’s offerings on one biometric smart card to help increase access to critical services and advance economic inclusion for Africans living in remote communities. Photo: File

Mastercard has partnered with African fintech and Start Path company Paycode to provide both company’s offerings on one biometric smart card to help increase access to critical services and advance economic inclusion for Africans living in remote communities. Photo: File

Published Sep 15, 2021

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MASTERCARD has partnered with African fintech and Start Path company Paycode to provide both company’s offerings on one biometric smart card to help increase access to critical services and advance economic inclusion for Africans living in remote communities.

Mastercard’s Community Pass platform would be included in Paycode’s Electronic Data And Payments Technology platform (Edapt) that currently provided a secure, biometric identity as well as a digital bank account. Individuals could access digital financial services off-line in real-time even if they lacked a formal identity document such as a birth certificate or passport.

Community Pass would allow a person’s face or palm to be recognised at both online and off-line locations, also leveraging consistent technology standards so that an individual can seamlessly access financial, health, agricultural, or aid services across providers, including government disbursements.

The partnership’s goal is to onboard 30 million individuals living in remote, unconnected areas of Africa over the next three years, enabling them to access the products and services they need with a Community Pass biometric smart card that runs on Paycode’s Edapt platform.

Mastercard SVP for Sales and Market Development, H&D Ricardo Pareja said that adding Inclusive ID functionality to Paycode biometric smart cards helps reach those currently excluded from critical government programmes and ensures they were addressing basic financial needs of a dispersed population.

“As we seek to drive beyond inclusion to fostering prosperity in communities across the globe, a critical focus for Mastercard is to help enable the interoperability and scale of solutions like those provided by Paycode.”

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