Global payments giant Mastercard decides to invest $1 billion or around Rs 7,000 crore in India over the course of five years. Out of the total capital, Mastercard plans to spend around $350 million on a local payments processing centre, in line with RBI’s mandate of local data storage. This processing centre is expected to open in another 18 months, generating employment for 1,000 people. This will be Mastercard’s first such processing centre outside of the US and could service markets such as Southeast Asia and APAC.
The payments processing centre is most likely to be set up in Pune. It is expected to handle multiple tasks such as circuit switching for ATMs, Point of Sale, e-commerce transactions, fraud mitigation, tokenisation and authentication, according to the company.
As reported by Economic Times, division president for South Asia Mastercard Porush Singh, said this global technological node will not only be doing authorisation and processing, but will bring other value-added services as well. He added that these capabilities will keep evolving over time and they will look at other markets they can service out of there.
Mastercard is expected to invest the remaining amount in expanding its team that services its overseas operations and grow locally. They did not specify the employment that’s likely to be generated in the process and said that it would depend on how digital payments scale up in India.
Singh said that they are investing in both technology and people and already have centres in Gurugram, Vadodara and Pune. He added that a large chunk of that value is going to be in India itself, and hence they looking at how they can deploy it across multiple markets in the region.
Mastercard has pumped in around Rs 6,500 crore in the past five years, growing its team from 30 to 2,000. India is currently Mastercard’s second-largest location in terms of its workforce after the US.
