Plastic payment cards are over half-a-century old. Even if there were marginal improvements like the chip, pin and contactless technology, the basic fact that we have to carry around a bunch of plastic cards around in our wallets has not changed. But now, with the vast use of mobile phones and improved technology, the payment companies are looking towards bringing the plastic cards into the modern era using the smartphones.
So, Apple has started Apple Pay, Google has come up with the Android Pay and Samsung has its own Samsung Pay—all three of which depend on fingerprint scanning on our phones to make payments. Even as payment companies like Visa and MasterCard support all these new technologies, they are looking for new technologies of their own to make transactions easier and secure. To that effect, MasterCard recently came up with a new technology that also makes transactions fun by incorporating a selfie.
The man behind the idea of taking a selfie to pay in a shop is Ajay Bhalla, president of Enterprise Security Solutions at MasterCard.
Bhalla has a bachelor’s degree in commerce from the University of Delhi, and a master’s degree in Management Studies from the University of Mumbai. After stints at Xerox and HSBC, Bhalla joined MasterCard and in the last 23 years, he led some of the biggest innovations that the payment company has been part of. Now as a president, he is out to make sure that more than 51 billion global transactions go through without hiccups, each year.