MasterCard has announced an investment in and partnership with mobile wallet and transactions platform provider C-SAM. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Founded in 1998, Chicago-based C-SAM basically powers mobile wallets on the backend. This includes back-end management infrastructure, software development kits and on-device software that support secure proximity near field communications (NFC), bar code, QR code and cloud-based transactions. The C-SAM platform also supports customer-specific offers, loyalty incentives, banking, bill-pay options and non-financial secure transactions.
According to the release, C-SAM will use MasterCard’s digital payment infrastructure, including the credit card company’s own digital PayPass Wallet Services. The companies had previously had a marketing partnership that was formed earlier this year.
Customers include Discover, Axis Bank, StarHub and a number of others.
MasterCard doesn’t fund a large amount of companies so while this is a minority investment, it’s interesting that the company is betting on mobile wallet infrastructure. The credit card giant also recently backed mFoundry, and bought personalized offers company Truaxis (formerly BillShrink).