MasterCard to Launch an Open API

Online payment systems may not sound like the hottest piece of technology, but the market is quickly becoming very interesting. If PayPal’s success is any indication, there’s plenty of money to be made from money. Not that you need to tell MasterCard that. Still, the credit card company is maybe starting to feel the heat so it’s planning to launch an API later this year to take on any number of startups coming up with online or mobile payment systems.

“We are excited about tapping into the ingenuity of software developers around the globe to help create the next generation of game-changing payment applications,” Josh Peirez, chief innovation officer, MasterCard Worldwide, said. “We feel this will unleash innovation within our industry especially in the burgeoning areas of e-commerce and mobile payments.”

The upcoming APIs will be the first products to come out of the newly created MasterCard Labs. In the future, the program will provide third-party developers with APIs, SDKs, as well as documentation and help in implementing the new tools.

MasterCard says it believes there are at least 20 areas where the new APIs could be used. However, it hopes that developers will find even more creative ways of using the data and tools the company will provide. There are two big areas of growth for payments at this point, mobile and e-commerce. With the proliferation of smartphones and increasingly connected devices, people are finding them useful for this kind of applications as well.

MasterCard follows on the footsteps of PayPal, which released an API late last year, PayPal X. It also enables third-party developers to leverage the platform and there have been several interesting applications built around it. The company is in a better position to engage with developers than MasterCard, thanks to its existing relationships, but the giant credit card company is a force to reckoned with.