LONDON — The experience of paying for products and services online could feel a lot different in the coming years.
Starting from 2030, Mastercard will no longer require Europeans to enter their card numbers manually when checking out online — no matter what platform or device they’re using.
Mastercard will announce Tuesday in a fireside chat with CNBC that, by 2030, all cards it issues on its network in Europe will be tokenized.
In other words, instead of the 16-digit card number we’re all accustomed to using for transactions, this will be replaced with a randomly generated “token.”
The firm says it’s been working with banks, fintechs, merchants and other partners to phase out manual card entry for e-commerce by 2030 in Europe, in favor of a one-click button across all online platforms.
This will ensure that consumers’ cards are secure against fraud attempts, Mastercard says.
Users won’t have to keep entering passwords every time they try to make a payment, as Mastercard is introducing passkeys that replace passwords.
It will also enable customers to make one-click payments at checkout using biometric authentication with a thumbprint.
Cards stored in a merchants’ page or electronic wallet via tokenization can be automatically updated wherever they’re stored when they’re replaced or renewed.
Reducing fraud
Mastercard says 100% tokenization across e-commerce sites will reduce fraud rates dramatically.
According to market research firm Juniper Research, losses from online payment fraud are expected to exceed $91 billion by 2028 — totaling more than $362 billion globally over the next five years.
Adoption of tokenization, Mastercard says, has been increasing at a rate of 50% each year and now secures about 25% of all e-commerce transactions globally across its network.
Mastercard said it’s rolling out the change in Europe as the Continent has long been a leader in payments innovations, such as contactless payments and online banking, which allowed banking users to share their accounts’ data to access new financial products.
“In Europe we have seen tokenization gaining momentum across the ecosystem, the convenience and reduced rates of fraud sell themselves,” Valerie Nowak, executive vice president, product and innovation at Mastercard Europe, said in a statement.
“We are confident that reaching this vision by 2030 is a win-win-win for shoppers, retailers and the card issuers alike.”
Future of payments
From the arrival of credit cards for the first time in the 1950s and 1960s, to the shift toward paying for things online that came with the widespread adoption of the internet in the early 2000s, the ways we pay have undergone a few pretty dramatic changes throughout the decades.
In the early days when credit cards were first introduced, bank clerks would check card numbers against a book of invalid numbers or call the issuing bank to check the person making the payment is who they say they are.
So-called zip-zap machines that would imprint card numbers on carbon paper packets were the primary way of paying via credit card at the checkout counter.
That was until the 1970s and 1980s, when magnetic stripes and electronic payment terminals took over.
They were succeeded by cards with microchips that stored data on the card’s owner, number and expiry date.
Mastercard is betting its move toward this new “embedded” payment system will be as dramatic a shift as the move toward chip and PIN, or the adoption of contactless payments, which are now widely used in developed economies across the world.
The company says its technology will make the experience of paying for items online as smooth as making a contactless payment in-store. It says it means that consumers will be able to make payments with one click across any device including smartwatches, home assistants and even cars.
For example, Mastercard has a partnership with Mercedes-Benz that allows the automaker’s customers to use a fingerprint sensor in their car to make digital payments at more than 3,600 service stations across Germany.
White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) on March 9, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Samuel Corum | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tesla shares fell in premarket trade on Monday after CEO Elon Musk announced plans to form a new political party.
The stock was down 7.13% by 4:27 a.m. E.T.
Musk said over the weekend that the party would be called the “America Party” and could focus “on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.” He suggested this would be “enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”
Now tech billionaire’s reinvolvement in the political arena is making investors nervous.
“Very simply Musk diving deeper into politics and now trying to take on the Beltway establishment is exactly the opposite direction that Tesla investors/shareholders want him to take during this crucial period for the Tesla story,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, said in a note on Sunday.
“While the core Musk supporters will back Musk at every turn no matter what, there is broader sense of exhaustion from many Tesla investors that Musk keeps heading down the political track.”
Musk’s previous political foray earned him Trump’s praise in the early days, but he has since drawn the ire of the U.S. president.
The two have clashed over various areas of policy, including Trump’s spending bill which Musk has said would increase America’s debt burden. Musk has taken issue to particular cuts to tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles.
Trump on Sunday called Musk’s move to form a political party “ridiculous,” adding that the Tesla boss had gone “completely off the rails.”
Musk is contending with more than just political turmoil. Tesla reported a 14% year-on-year decline in car deliveries in the second quarter, missing expectations. The company is facing rising competition, especially in its key market, China.
Jonathan Ross, chief executive officer of Groq Inc., during the GenAI Summit in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, May 30, 2024.
David Paul | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence semiconductor startup Groq announced Monday it has established its first data center in Europe as it steps up its international expansion.
Groq, which is backed by investment arms of Samsung and Cisco, said the data center will be located in Helsinki, Finland and is in partnership with Equinix.
Groq is looking to take advantage of rising demand for AI services in Europe following other U.S. firms which have also ramped up investment in the region. The Nordics in particular is a popular location for the data facilities as the region has easy access to renewable energy and cooler climates. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Europe and signed several infrastructure deals, including data centers.
Groq, which is valued at $2.8 billion, designs a chip that the company calls a language processing unit (LPU). It is designed for inferencing rather training. Inferencing is when a pre-trained AI model interprets live data to come up with a result, much like the answers that are produced by popular chatbots.
While Nvidia has a stranglehold on the chips required for training huge AI models with its graphics processing units (GPUs), there is a swathe of startups hoping to take a slice of the pie when it comes to inferencing. SambaNova; Ampere, a company SoftBank is in the process of purchasing; Cerebras and Fractile, are all looking to join the AI inference race.
European politicians have been pushing the notion of sovereign AI — where data centers must be located in the region. Data centers that are located closer to users also help improve the speed of services.
Global data center builder Equinix connects different cloud providers together, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, making it easier for businesses to have multiple vendors. Groq’s LPUs will be installed inside the Equinix data center allowing businesses to access Groq’s inference capabilities via Equinix.
Groq currently has data centers in the U.S. and Canada and Saudi Arabia with its technology.
Don’t miss Groq CEO Jonathan Ross on Squawk Box Europe at 7:45 a.m. London time.
Hidden among the majestic canyons of the Utah desert, about 7 miles from the nearest town, is a small research facility meant to prepare humans for life on Mars.
The Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that runs the Mars Desert Research Station, or MDRS, invited CNBC to shadow one of its analog crews on a recent mission.
“MDRS is the best analog astronaut environment,” said Urban Koi, who served as health and safety officer for Crew 315. “The terrain is extremely similar to the Mars terrain and the protocols, research, science and engineering that occurs here is very similar to what we would do if we were to travel to Mars.”
SpaceX CEO and Mars advocate Elon Musk has said his company can get humans to Mars as early as 2029.
The 5-person Crew 315 spent two weeks living at the research station following the same procedures that they would on Mars.
David Laude, who served as the crew’s commander, described a typical day.
“So we all gather around by 7 a.m. around a common table in the upper deck and we have breakfast,” he said. “Around 8:00 we have our first meeting of the day where we plan out the day. And then in the morning, we usually have an EVA of two or three people and usually another one in the afternoon.”
An EVA refers to extravehicular activity. In NASA speak, EVAs refer to spacewalks, when astronauts leave the pressurized space station and must wear spacesuits to survive in space.
“I think the most challenging thing about these analog missions is just getting into a rhythm. … Although here the risk is lower, on Mars performing those daily tasks are what keeps us alive,” said Michael Andrews, the engineer for Crew 315.