Mastercard, Visa Deploy Passkeys in India

- The move to passkeys aligns with the Reserve Bank of India's directive for at least one dynamic authentication factor for digital payments, which is set to take effect on April 1, 2026. This initiative is designed to combat the rising incidence of card fraud in India, which was estimated to be over ₹1,800 crore between FY22 and September 2025. - Mastercard's initial pilot in India includes major payment aggregators like Juspay, Razorpay, and PayU, online merchants such as bigbasket, and Axis Bank. This launch is part of a broader global rollout strategy, with India being the first market due to its rapidly expanding and advanced tokenization ecosystem. - Passkeys leverage the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance standards, which use public-key cryptography to provide more secure and user-friendly authentication. When a user registers, their device creates a private and a public key; the public key is stored on the service's server, while the private key remains on the user's device, secured by biometrics or a PIN. - The underlying technology combines passkeys with tokenization, where the actual card number is replaced by a unique alphanumeric identifier. This token is useless to fraudsters if intercepted, as it does not contain any of the cardholder's personal information. - India's real-time payment system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has seen massive adoption, processing over 14 billion transactions in May 2024 alone and accounting for nearly half of all global digital payments. The growth of UPI, which is projected to handle 54 billion transactions monthly by 2030, highlights the market's readiness for advanced digital payment solutions like passkeys. - AI and machine learning are becoming critical in detecting payment fraud by analyzing transaction data in real-time to identify anomalies and patterns that might indicate fraudulent activity. These systems can detect and even predict sophisticated fraud types like identity theft and account takeovers, reducing false positives and improving the customer experience. - For product leaders in large enterprises, a key challenge is navigating internal dependencies and influencing cross-functional teams without direct authority. Success often requires a deep understanding of how their product fits into the customer's broader technology landscape and effectively communicating with various departments, each with its own subculture and priorities. - Despite regulatory uncertainty, institutional investment in cryptocurrencies in India has grown by 30-50% year-over-year, with a focus on high-liquidity coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the second consecutive year, India leads the world in grassroots crypto adoption across retail, institutional, and DeFi sectors.