Mastercard’s “Consumer Control” System Puts More Control into Cards

Ever wonder where that charge on your card came from? Or why you have access to a certain website you really don’t visit any more? Chances are you’ve got a charge or two you’ve just forgotten about, and Mastercard is out to help fix that particular foible of modern life with its new Consumer Control system, recently unveiled at the Money 20/20 event.

As it turns out, according to a report from Mastercard, 60 percent of users out there just don’t know all the places where their credit card data is stored. With Consumer Control, Mastercard is providing users with the means to not only find out where that data is on hand, but what to do about it once they’ve found out.

Basically, the system connects to a trusted provider—a bank or credit union, commonly, who issued the cards—and allows users to see in one centralized viewing location just who’s got credit card data on file. From there, users can better make decisions about what to do with that information.

If that sounds impressive, brace yourself; it turns out that Mastercard now has 35 separate application programming interfaces (APIs) geared toward consumer offerings, and these new APIs are being quite well-received. So far, the Mastercard API Platform has seen use quadruple, a 400 percent increase since it started up.

I actually had a chance to talk to Mastercard reps before the official word came out, and they filled me in on a couple interesting points. Not only does the Consumer Control API effectively allow users to spot forgotten subscriptions—and remove these cash vampires before they drive a user into the poor house—but it also helps in terms of tokenization.

With Consumer Control, it becomes possible for a card to continue to be used even when the card itself expires. So if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve had to update your payment information after a card goes dim, you won’t have to do that with Consumer Control in place.

Consumer Control could be a huge step forward for Mastercard, thanks to the sheer amount of uses in the field it would have. All that’s left is to get it into users’ hands and see what kind of impact all that newfound control has.