Mastercard has announced the launch of Mastercard Cloud Edge, a significant cloud-based connectivity solution designed to accelerate the onboarding process for Asia Pacific banks and fintechs onto its network by up to four times faster. This initiative aims to streamline the launch of various payment tools, marking a pivotal step in enhancing financial infrastructure in the region. The solution is offered in close collaboration with leading cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, highlighting a strategic partnership to leverage advanced cloud capabilities.

The introduction of Cloud Edge comes at a time when the global fintech industry is experiencing rapid expansion, with projections indicating a growth rate approximately three times faster than the overall banking sector through 2028. This growth is predominantly fueled by emerging markets in Asia Pacific, where cloud computing plays an integral role. Cloud computing is expected to contribute over US$1 trillion in value across the world’s top 500 companies, with the Asia Pacific cloud market specifically projected to reach nearly US$311 billion by 2029, underscoring its critical importance for fintech innovation and scale.

Sandeep Malhotra, Executive Vice President, Core Payments, Asia Pacific, Mastercard, emphasized that Cloud Edge brings pioneering innovations in cloud and payments directly to financial institutions and cloud-native organizations. He stated that the solution reinforces Mastercard's commitment to resiliency, redundancy, and security, while simultaneously offering customers greater cost efficiency, choice, speed, and flexibility. For instance, cloud computing enables fintechs to seamlessly handle demand spikes, such as those during national holidays or major sales events, without the need for additional physical infrastructure.

Mastercard Cloud Edge provides customers, including issuers, acquirers, network enablement partners, and payment processors, with seamless, private connectivity to Mastercard, powered by the speed and scale of the cloud across Asia Pacific. This ensures that customers are not constrained by a single IT infrastructure or on-premises solutions. The solution also accelerates time to market for new products and services and ensures regulatory compliance with local data storage and processing requirements, empowering customers to develop fintech solutions more rapidly. Additionally, it leads to lower capital expenditure and maintenance costs by eliminating the overhead associated with physical data centers and provides direct access to modern payment technology, such as Transaction APIs built on ISO 20022-standardized payloads.

John Mitchell, Co-Founder and CEO of Episode Six, a global provider of enterprise-grade ledger and cards infrastructure, lauded the collaboration. He highlighted that Episode Six's bank-grade technology was purpose-built for the cloud, underscoring the importance of robust infrastructure for partners to scale securely. Mitchell expressed enthusiasm for working with Mastercard on Cloud Edge, noting its potential to reduce time to market for their clients while ensuring data security, backup, and protection through cloud encryption.

Scott Mullins, Managing Director, Financial Services, AWS, affirmed that AWS Regions across Asia Pacific offer Mastercard extensive connectivity and secure cloud services. He added that this, combined with Mastercard’s global footprint, provides organizations in the region with low-latency access to the payment network, ensuring seamless operations and compliance with regional data residency regulations.

Mastercard Cloud Edge is currently available across various Asia Pacific markets, including India, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, and Thailand. Its reach extends globally to the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa, indicating Mastercard's commitment to enhancing payment infrastructure on a worldwide scale.