MasterCard is expanding its digital aid distribution services – MasterCard Aid Network – with the launch of Mastercard Humanitarian Aid Solutions, the company announced yesterday, during the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
The new solution will leverage MasterCard’s expertise and technology to provide multiple NGOs with a single card per beneficiary, and which will contain both a reloadable prepaid account and a MasterCard Aid points account, the company said. NGOs will also be able to quickly and securely reload the card with additional funds as needed, through MasterCard Send.
MasterCard Aid Network, launched last year, is intended to replace the use of cash in areas of natural or man-made disasters. Cards and readers work completely offline and are delivered to dangerous areas by local NGOs through MasterCard partnership. The payments network will now also provide an analytics tool for organizations to track the data behind the fund allocation and utilization.
Sustainability is key, as MasterCard seeks for more FI and NGO partners in this project, Carlos Cornejo, global head of New Consumers at MC, told Bank Innovation.
We are leveraging the chip technology with MasterCard’s highest standards of security. The EMV technology is just one of the components, as we have developed the apps, on smartphones of the merchants that are providing the aid. One of our key priorities is financial inclusion of course, but we are seeing this as a business, because it needs to be sustainable. That’s why we are investing and we have concrete roadmaps on how to leveraging all MasterCard assets to solve the big issues.