North America
Middle East & Africa
Latin America & Caribbean
Europe
Asia Pacific
One project
Six projects
Two projects
Five projects
Reimagining public transit
ASIA PACIFIC
EUROPE
Fueling small businesses with data and cyber tools
Harnessing data and AI to support tourism SMEs
Tourism recovery powered by data insights
Developing a sustainable tourism proposition
Measuring the impact of city events
Poland’s small businesses go digital
A new mobile app makes tax payments simpler and safer
Eurovision 2023 boosts the Liverpool economy
Making transport accessible and inclusive
LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN
Inclusive innovation in tourism
Scaling digital revenue and tax collections
MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA
Enabling efficient free-flow tolling
Supporting small businesses with targeted payments
NORTH AMERICA
Growing the local economy with data insights
Cyber education for small businesses
Measuring the impact of disbursements
Behavioral health response
A metropolitan transport operator wanted to improve accessibility and efficiency on its city transport network. The agency collaborated with Mastercard to bring contactless card payments to city trains, rail and ferry services, facilitating frictionless, seamless payments for residents and visitors. The collaboration also brought to life a digital-first transit card program, allowing regular users to store and manage the digital card on mobile phones.
TRANSIT
Back to Home
A prominent tourism destination wanted to develop a sustainable tourism proposition and a revitalized destination strategy. Mastercard collaborated with the city’s local government to drive its positioning as a digital-first, inclusive destination that prioritizes sustainable tourism. Leveraging Mastercard’s data insights, the collaboration brought to life a media campaign highlighting the local culture, diversity and authenticity of the city. Marketing tactics included leveraging outdoor advertising, street marketing, social media content and a digital landing page featuring a local influencer.
TOURISM
Back to Region
A Middle East city government agency sought to grow tax and revenue management services. The agency collaborated with Mastercard to leverage the Mastercard Payment Gateway Services (MPGS) to scale e-commerce acceptance of tax collections via card and digital wallets, while simultaneously addressing security concerns by piloting Mastercard’s Biometric Check Out program.
COLLECTIONS
In one North American county, thousands of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were severely impacted by closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mastercard collaborated with the county government to issue prepaid debit cards to qualifying SMEs to be used towards qualified expenses and offset negative effects of the pandemic, supporting the region’s economic recovery and giving business owners a fresh start post-pandemic.
DISBURSEMENTS/SMES
One of Latin America’s largest metropolitan area transit operators collaborated with Mastercard to drive awareness around the use and accessibility of contactless payments. The collaboration brought contactless payment acceptance to life across thousands of metropolitan bus lines, while boosting financial inclusion in the region through the launch of a specialized transit card for the unbanked.
Latin America & caribbean
Since the pandemic, the way citizens shop, bank and work has evolved — and so have the strategies of cyber criminals. With small businesses continuing to expand their online footprint, it has become increasingly important for the public sector to help them protect their online operations. A North American city business federation collaborated with Mastercard to provide local small businesses with resources, tools and best practices to safeguard their operations against an increasing volume of cyberattacks.
CYBER/SMES
A Middle Eastern metropolitan area suffered excessive congestion across its bridge and tunnel network. The city’s metropolitan authority collaborated with Mastercard to roll out a digital-first system for toll payments, facilitating an open wallet for a state-of-the-art tunnel app embedded with transaction processing services. The program has resulted in a major reduction in traffic congestion in the area, as well as a reduction in vehicle exhaust emissions.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, a leading European tourism destination wanted to gain insight into visitors’ behavior to manage tourism flows more effectively. The city’s tourism authority collaborated with Mastercard to conduct a microanalysis into tourism spend, activities, movement and concentration to inform the city’s tourism recovery. The program established a new data framework to avoid overcrowding in a central city area, empowering city planners with strategic data to inform operational and policy planning, while improving tourism flows.
A popular European tourism destination collaborated with Mastercard to promote digitalization of the city’s tourism small businesses. The collaboration facilitated access for tourism-focused SMEs to obtain aggregated, anonymized transaction data, driving loyalty and informing strategy. The work builds on that of the Mastercard Labs as a Service team in developing a tourism data space in the region to provide SMEs with insights and forecasting tools to optimize business operations, including instant benchmarking data to compare performance, as well as personalized data-driven recommendations.
One European city council, through its Smart City program, has long been exploring ways to harness data insights to support data-driven decision-making. The municipality collaborated with Mastercard to tap into anonymized, aggregated spend data to track the impact of a major sporting event held in the city in summer 2022. The new insights generated from the analysis enabled the city council to make informed decisions about the potential impact of similar events in the future.
TOURISM/DATA
An average of 10% of U.S. law enforcement agencies’ total budgets are spent on responding to and transporting people with mental illnesses, according to a 2019 study by the Treatment Advocacy Center. In one U.S. state capital, an emergency response unit collaborated with Mastercard to leverage its Test & Learn platform to analyze aggregated, anonymized data from the city’s behavioral health division, harnessing insights to demonstrate through real-time data how the program is delivering on its promise to help people in crisis while reducing the need and cost of police and emergency services response.
ESG
In collaboration with a national tourism authority and the national postal service, Mastercard supported the launch of a pilot program to support small businesses operating in the tourism sector. This program seeks to enhance the traveler experience while generating new opportunities for local producers and SMEs in the country. Visitors are now able to seamlessly purchase local products in person or online and have the items shipped to their homes across the world with one tap. The initiative promotes innovation and digitalization and seeks to develop tourism in a more sustainable and inclusive way.
Tourism
A large city government closed several streets to cars (“pedestrianized”) in the hope of promoting the local economy. However, the public sector authority lacked the data and tools to know if there was a measurable impact. The Mastercard Impact Evaluator team leveraged aggregated, anonymized spending data to conduct a baseline analysis of spending in the region, before using Test & Learn® to measure the initiative’s impact. The street closure resulted in higher sales at local restaurants and apparel stores, as resident traffic to the area grew. This analysis helped provide the government body with the evidence required to keep implementing street closures going forward.
DATA
A local government used the Mastercard disbursement solution to distribute funds to community members during COVID-19 via Mastercard prepaid credit cards. The local government wanted to evaluate the impact of this disbursement program on community spending activity and general well-being. These solutions allowed the team to accurately measure the effects of the disbursement program on community spending and identify where the program was most impactful.
Disbursements
CYBER/TOURISM/SMES
A European regional government collaborated with Mastercard to promote digitalization and innovation across agriculture, cybersecurity and tourism sectors. The collaboration resulted in a suite of programs designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through the provision of digital resources, tools and services that allow for real-time evaluation of cybersecurity measures, while undertaking an in-depth study of the region’s tourism economy across several years to inform future policy and further support SMEs in the region.
Government revenue collections
The Authority for the Digitalization of Romania (ADR) announced their intention to modernize their national tax portal, Ghiseul.ro, and develop a mobile application to enable ease of online payments across a variety of institutions and types of taxes. As a long-standing partner in digitalization, Mastercard has supported the Ghiseul.ro project since its inception in 2011 with the launch of a web-based platform. Funded by Mastercard and in collaboration with ADR and Tremend Software Consulting, the development of the Ghiseul.ro mobile application began. Launched in 2023, the mobile app is a modern, safe and efficient way for its over 2.25m registered users to pay taxes, fees and public services.
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SME
With support from the Polish Ministry of Development & Technology and the Polish Bank Association, Mastercard collaborated with key industry partners to launch the Cashless Poland Program, aimed at driving nationwide cashless payment adoption. Initially, the program offered SMEs free cashless POS terminals for a 12-month period, generating benefits not only for its stakeholders but also for SMEs and consumers. Since its launch in 2017, the program has expanded to serve the payment needs of government offices, welcomed new acquirers, banks, and distribution partners, and now offers the latest digital payment acceptance solutions, such as softPOS, to meet evolving customer needs. To date, 465,000 merchants have participated in the program.
DATA INSIGHTS
Liverpool hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 May 5–13, drawing 473,000 attendees and an estimated 306,000 individuals to Liverpool city centre. The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music and the Consumer Data Research Center (CDRC) identified a need for a robust and replicable methodology that would generate insights derived from real-life spending patterns related to the event. Based on Mastercard's aggregated and anonymized data, the Liverpool team was able to perform a multi-dimensional analysis of spending trends within the Liverpool City Region during the week of the Eurovision Song Contest. Mastercard’s spend data insights confirmed that Eurovision 2023 had a significant impact on the local economy – specifically within typical nighttime sectors, such as bars, clubs and entertainment. The event generated increased income in and around the city center, specifically within a 5-to-15-minute minute walk from the Eurovision Village. Mastercard’s geographic insights helped quantify the real impact of a mega event on the local economy.
