Wio Bank Enrols Cards in Mastercard Click to Pay for UAE Shoppers
Wio cardholders in the UAE can now pay online without entering card details, after the bank switched on Mastercard's Click to Pay by default.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
Wio Bank customers in the UAE can now pay for purchases online without typing in their card details. The bank has enrolled its cards in Mastercard Click to Pay, a checkout service for online card payments, so the information is supplied automatically once a shopper reaches the payment step.
Customers do not have to sign up. Enrolment is automatic for Wio cardholders. Both the bank and the network describe Wio as the first card issuer in the UAE to adopt Click to Pay.
What sits behind the checkout
Click to Pay runs on tokenisation. A unique code stands in for the card number during a transaction, which keeps the card details themselves hidden at checkout. The service works across devices and browsers, and Mastercard says the number of merchants accepting it keeps growing.
Approval is handled by Mastercard Payment Passkey. A shopper confirms a purchase with a fingerprint or a face scan on their own device, and neither passwords nor one-time codes are part of the process any more.
Mastercard says no sensitive payment data is shared with third parties. It also says payment data intercepted in transit is of no use to fraudsters.
What the two companies say
Prateek Vahie, chief commercial officer at Wio Bank, said switching Click to Pay on by default lets customers complete e-commerce purchases with a single click and adds peace of mind. Gina Petersen-Skyrme, senior vice president and country manager for the UAE and Oman at Mastercard, said the company is working to make online checkout faster, more secure and more intuitive.
Where the risk sits
The change matters less at the checkout screen than in what travels and gets stored along the way. If the card number never leaves the token, and approval happens on the shopper's own device, there is little payment data left for a fraudster to capture and reuse. That is the argument Mastercard is making as it pushes the same approach across the industry.
The 2030 target
Mastercard and its partners aim for online shopping to be fully tokenised and verified by 2030. Issuer enrolment is one half of that. The other is merchant coverage, since the option only appears at checkouts where the merchant has switched it on. Wio cardholders will meet it wherever that support already exists.
