Maestro

Oberthur Technologies has partnered with Hungarian largest financial institution OTB Bank for contactless payment city cards in Pécs, 5th largest city in the country.

Oberthur’s contactless citizen card represents an international banking card that can be used not only for payments but also for other transactions across 150 million merchant locations within Maestro network. The prepaid card can easily be loaded via the Internet or with cash in an OTP Bank branch.

MasterCard Worldwide has announced appointment of Carlos Menendez to the post of Group Executive, Global Debit, effective September 1, 2010. Menendez will have global responsibility for innovation, commercialization and development of go-to-market strategies for the portfolio of MasterCard debit products around the world, including Debit MasterCard, Maestro and Cirrus brands.

Banka Koper is conducting a trial in Slovenia to implement mobile contactless payments across the nation. The trial will be joined by a group of payment and wireless industry leaders including CASSIS International, INSIDE Contactless, Sagem Orga and Sagem Wireless, in cooperation with Mobitel, the leading mobile service provider in Slovenia. The pilot program will run through June 2010.

 Credit card still remains the method of payment for more than 80% of all purchases. But in stead of this Maestro and giropay market shares have risen again. Now maestro takes the third place among the preferred online payment methods in Europe. Deutsche Card Services published the results of E-Commerce Report 2009 which says that Visa has increased its market share in European e-commerce at the expense of MasterCard. More than 70% of all online transactions are paid by Visa credit cards. Different payment methods in e-commerce are used by the men and the women.