As e-commerce and digital payments gain traction worldwide, Mastercard, in conjunction with Standard Bank, on Tuesday launched a digital wallet mobile phone application, MasterPass, as a new way to transact safely and securely when shopping online.

MasterPass would enable South Africans to experience seamless, speedy and secure online shopping, meeting the availability of secure payment facilities online deemed critical by 90% of South African consumers.

Over 40% of consumers had cited concerns about the safety of online transactions as the reason for not shopping online, despite the convenience.

The new digital wallet application, which was launched internationally last year, enabled ease of access with the network allowing customers to store all their details securely in one place, eliminating the need for customers to re-enter their delivery address and payment details every time they shopped.

The two-step payment process – after the initial registration – would reduce the number of “carts” abandoned, which affected about 67% of online purchases, leading to increased sales and removing barriers to online shopping, said Mastercard head of emerging payments Aaron Oliver at the launch in Johannesburg.

The South African market, which had become the tenth market to host MasterPass – the first in the Middle East and Africa region - would also be the first worldwide to host a unique MasterPass functionality, allowing South Africans to use their pin-based debit cards for online shopping.

The pin-based authentication functionality would significantly open online shopping to a much wider group of consumers.

“Standard Bank is excited to be pushing the frontiers of the payments technology landscape, enabling not only South African cardholders, but also our merchant partners to provide slicker payment options to the market,” Standard Bank group head of cards Chris Sweeney said.

The app, which could be downloaded for Apple, Android or Blackberry devices, was accepted as a payment method at online stores such as Takealot, FlySAA and ticketing site Plankton.mobi. Many other merchants were set to go live with MasterPass soon.

Further, MasterPass users were able to shop internationally at over 40 000 online merchants, in the nine other countries – including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and China – that the digital wallet had been launched in since inception last year.

Standard Bank noted that soon any South African bank and their merchant partners would be able to offer MasterPass.

“We hope to further galvanise the rapid rise we have seen in e-commerce in South Africa recently, and create the platform for future growth in the payments industry,” he said.

As MasterPass evolved, it expected to add in-app and in-store purchases to its service offering.