Mastercard is confident that it will continue to achieve double-digit revenue growth in Germany in the future. „We are continuing to grow strongly – and there is no end to the momentum in sight,“ said Peter Robejsek, Country Manager for Germany, in an interview with the Börsen-Zeitung.

Mastercard's revenues outside the USA grew by 11% in the past quarter. „We expect that we will continue to grow at an annual rate in the lower double-digit range over the next few years,“ the Country Manager for Germany confidently predicts. Traditional transactions are slowly but steadily receding into the background. Mastercard has achieved the most robust growth on the revenue side in services – in other words, in everything that happens around the transaction. It now generate around a third of its revenues here.

The core of the transaction includes authorisation, clearing and settlement. But there is still a lot to do before and after, whether it's fighting cybercrime before the transaction, onboarding customers as quickly as possible using just a few data points, or personalising a retailer's online presence for the customer. Or the operation of loyalty programmes after the transaction.

„In our view, transactions between companies have additional potential, especially in the German SME sector,“ Robejsek emphasises. Technical solutions that show a treasurer where a payment is at any time could help to make better use of payment terms. The classic correspondent banking system can be supplemented and modernised at these points.

According to the company, 36% of transaction volumes in the retail sector in Germany still take place in cash. There is, therefore still potential for providers of digital payment methods such as Mastercard, the country manager believes. In addition, the German Girocard accounts for 42% of sales from non-cash payment methods in this country. „We still see potential for us here too, especially as we are constantly modernising payment methods – from magnetic strips to tokenization.“

Currently, just under half of e-commerce transactions in Germany are tokenized. „But our goal is 100%,“ says Robejsek. Everyone benefits. „The retailer has the certainty that more transactions will go through and the transaction is more secure, the consumer is less inconvenienced, and the bank has less to fear from fraud,“ explains the CEO.

An essential step towards this goal is to convince even more retailers to offer click-to-pay– a payment method that does not require registration with the retailer. Customers would only have to activate the click-to-pay service once for their card– then every connected retailer would recognise them, even without a customer account. According to Robejsek, Mastercard has just started with Lidl and Kaufland.

He is not worried that alternative payment solutions are currently being promoted with the EPI, the European Payments Initiative. „I am sure that the European Payments Initiative with the Wero Wallet has a clear idea of how it can offer customers added value in the payment process,“ says Robejsek. In his opinion, it would be unfair not to give EPI a certain amount of time to show that the initiative can deliver such added value.

Mastercard has always signalled „that we can be a suitable partner for a European payment initiative with our network and our services," he says. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. „We are always ready for constructive dialogue."

Cybersecurity is a major topic for the card provider. In the 2022/23 financial year, Mastercard prevented cybercrime losses totalling 20 billion euros. „We invest around one billion dollars in our systems every year for this purpose,“ explains the executive. This is „a never-ending arms race“ – and a very complex and expensive endeavour for anyone who operates a payment system. Security mechanisms have been installed both at the merchant banks and at the issuer banks, i.e. the institutions that issue cards to private customers – and, of course, also in the network.

Artificial Intelligence plays an important role. Generative AI can help partner banks decide whether a transaction is legitimate or not. Mastercard has further optimised real-time scoring for transactions using AI, and increased the fraud detection rate by more than 20%, while at the same time reducing the number of false alarms by 85%.

What generative AI can achieve can be seen in the board game Go. It is not individual players who have become better, but the level of all games has increased through the use of generative AI in the training programmes.

Large language models are still very capital-intensive. However, the incremental enlargement of these models no longer costs anything. This enables technology companies to build huge models.

The goal of machine learning is to create the most accurate picture of reality possible, in order to check whether a specific input of data fits it. Robejsek makes a comparison with the development of painting – from the first cave drawings to the Romantic period. The aim was always to depict reality more accurately. With the invention of photography, the marginal costs of this depiction of reality suddenly went to zero – from that point on, the focus was on recombining this codified knowledge so that new things could emerge - „just like, to stay with the image, in abstract painting or, by analogy, through generative artificial intelligence.“