Payments giant Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach has revealed company plans concerning cryptocurrencies at the Q3 financial results briefing on Thursday. He said that the company is ready to focus on providing crypto services as well as supporting the introduction of CBDCs.
“We could not have an earnings call without talking about crypto,” said Miebach when asked about the company’s participation in the growing space. The CEO touched upon several areas including the current state of consumer buying, selling, and investing in cryptocurrencies.
Recently, MasterCard announced that it has partnered with digital asset platform Bakkt to provide partner banks and companies with a mechanism that makes it easier to introduce cryptocurrency services.
The company’s new service “Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS)” is expected to increase general consumers’ access to the cryptocurrency field.
Miebach also mentioned the acquisition of blockchain data analytics company CipherTrace calling it a “massive services opportunity”. He said, “CipherTrace, 900 cryptocurrencies, what does CipherTrace actually do? They drive compliance and AML checks into crypto transactions.”
Miebach argued that cryptocurrency technology is most likely to work in the payments space when the payments would be made via Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). He added:
“We’ve said that on a couple of calls before. And we said we will make our network ready to do that as and when a government is ready to put out a central bank digital currency.”