Razer Merchant Services obtains Mastercard’s acquiring licence

• Enables merchants to connect to Mastercard products, solutions
• Timely as consumers increasingly use ePayments for goods, services

Razer Merchant Services (RMS), the B2B arm of Razer Fintech, announced that it has attained the Mastercard Direct Acquiring license, Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES), and Click to Pay (C2P) feature in Malaysia. 

In a statement, the firm said this will enable its merchants to seamlessly connect to Mastercard products and solutions. 

With this, Mastercard’s payment solutions will be accessible to RMS merchants across various industry verticals, including market traders, hawkers, e-hailing, e-sports, on-demand services, government, and education partners, it said.

The card scheme will enable merchants to offer card payments supported by seamless on-boarding and security, it added.

Lee Li Meng, chief executive officer of Razer Fintech said, “Our team continues to work closely with Mastercard to ensure that we can replicate the swift card scheme on-boarding and secure payment processing for all our merchants across Southeast Asia.

“We intend to extend our card scheme capabilities to other countries as well as we continue to scale across the region,” said Lee.

According to Bank Negara, ePayment services recorded a growth of 30.2% with 7.2 billion transactions in 2021 up from 5.5 billion in 2020. This increase is double than the pre-pandemic period of 2015 to 2019.

The central bank said on average, a consumer made 221 ePayment transactions in 2021, up from 170 transactions in 2021 with contactless and online transactions continuing to drive ePayment growth. 

Beena Pothen, country manager, Malaysia and Brunei, Mastercard said this partnership is key as Mastercard seeks to continually enhance ePayments acceptance among merchants with Razer Fintech. 

“Through this, Mastercard can further support its network of merchants to capitalise on opportunities to grow and scale in Malaysia’s growing e-commerce market including underserved segments such as market traders and hawkers.

“Additionally, the partnership elevates the payment experience for consumers by ensuring greater convenience, choice, security and peace of mind,” said Pothen.

She added that this further underscores Mastercard’s commitment to deliver advanced technology, timely innovations, and solutions to ensure Malaysian businesses are empowered and financially able to drive usage of ePayments in line with the nation’s cashless agenda as a digital economy.

RMS’ holistic card scheme payment ecosystem will also be further enhanced with its offerings to SME and Micro businesses through the RMS Virtual Terminal (VT) mobile application, which turns merchant smartphones into payment terminals. 

According to RMS, the VT App will seamlessly deploy contactless card payment acceptance through the “Tap-on-Phone” technology to ensure its current merchant base of 40,000 QR payment touchpoints can accept payments conveniently. 

It said the MDES certification will act as an added layer of security through the encryption of a cardholder’s 16-digit account number using a token, which will only be known to the cardholder.

Another Mastercard feature to be rolled out by RMS is the Click to Pay (C2P) feature, which delivers streamlined payments across digital checkouts and networks. 

The firm said the Mastercard’s C2P feature provides a standardised user experience for guest checkout by reducing clicks and checkout friction. 

This includes mitigating fraudulent transactions by protecting one-time passwords and bot detection, to ensure industry-standard authentication protocols and network tokenisation, it added.