Mastercard to Expand Footprint in India

The payments giant is set to make India a vital node in its global infrastructure, which will serve other markets including Southeast Asia.

Mastercard will invest $1 billion into its India operations as part of a five-year expansion plan, which is aimed at converting the country into a global technology node, its second after the United States, the firm announced on Monday.

There is a very large presence that Mastercard has built, and now, after having seen the last five years, we are very bullish on the overall Indian economy and what the future looks like, and clearly very excited about the digital payments ecosystem and payments ecosystem in general,» Ari Sarker, co-president, Asia Pacific at Mastercard told.

About $350 million will go towards setting up a new payments processing center, which is expected to open in the next 18 months and create additional employment for 1,000 people.

The node will do more than just authorization and processing, handling tasks such as circuit switching for ATMs, prepaid and PoS, e-commerce, and services like fraud mitigation, tokenization, and authentication. It would also be used to balance the processing load between the U.S. and India, and would likely serve other markets, including Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific.

The firm has invested $1 billion in India in the previous five years as it built up its India workforce from 30 in 2014 to 2,000 today. It is the firm’s second-largest globally after the U.S. in terms of the size of its workforce.