Mastercard is accelerating efforts to establish itself as the front running financial services provider in several parts of the world. In a new development, the US-based firm has partnered crypto gateway provider called Fasset to co-develop digital solutions to escalate crypto adoption in the country of Indonesia. The collaboration between Mastercard and Fasset aims to drive financial inclusion in Indonesia and get 92 million of its unbanked citizens to be part of the existing financial system.
As per Yahoo Finance, 66 percent of the Indonesian citizenry is currently unbanked. Meanwhile, a survey by The Jakarta Post recently said that 41 percent of Indonesians own crypto assets.
This partnership between Mastercard and Fasset intends to fill the financial cavities in Indonesia with appropriate digital tools.
“The world is changing at an unprecedented rate. With more people relying on digital assets and technologies to become resilient, there is a need for key players in the public and private sectors to come together to create solutions that can lead to new opportunities and solutions for wider financial inclusion,” Navin Jain, the country manager for Mastercard Indonesia was quoted as saying.
The development comes at a time when Asia is witnessing a constant growth in the crypto sector, especially from affluent investors. In nations like India, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand — the holdings of crypto and other digital assets have risen multi-fold in recent years, a report by Accenture recently claimed.
The findings indicated that Thailand and Indonesia dwellers hold the maximum percentage of digital assets in Asia, followed by India, Singapore, and Thailand.
“Our partnership seeks to lower the barriers to digital finance and drive greater opportunities to benefit from the use of emerging financial services. The implications on the industry are greater legitimisation of crypto assets, their use cases and areas of applications,” Hendra Suryakusuma from Fasset told the media.
As for Mastercard, this is not the first pro-crypto step that the company has taken to support the nascent Web3 industry.
Back in June, Mastercard inked deals with a total of seven new partners in order to open NFT access via traditional card payments to help drive NFT commerce.
Mastercard’s new partners include metaverse player The Sandbox along with Immutable X, Candy Digital, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and MoonPay.
Mastercard has already been working with Coinbase in order to support cash payments on the crypto exchange’s recently-launched NFT platform.
In May, Mastercard official Harold Bossé had said that cryptocurrencies need to be stitched into the global economic structure so intricately that they become next to invisible.
At this point, Bossé said, the lack of crypto knowledge is also a major factor that is obstructing its acceptance among the masses. He also noted that even at senior management levels, there is a crippling lack of crypto knowledge.
