The strategic alliance between Mastercard and Checkout.com is reshaping the customer experience in the GCC. As digital adoption across the Gulf surges and cash-on-delivery loses ground, the need for frictionless transactions has never been more urgent.
The biggest hurdle – checkout friction, the point where customer intent stalls before payment. With cart abandonment rates in the region reaching up to 70%, and over half of consumers reporting delays of up to two minutes to complete a transaction, the costs are both immediate and long-term.
In an conversation with Arabian Business, Prakriti Singh, EVP Core Payments at Mastercard, and Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo, General Manager, MENA at Checkout.com, shared how their collaboration is removing friction, boosting conversion, and setting a new standard for digital payments in the GCC.
“Today’s customers don’t want to spend time on checkout experience, or input endless details to complete a purchase,” explains Singh. “Through partnerships such as that with Checkout.com, we ensure that consumers and merchants don’t have to make the choice between simple and secure; the two should work hand-in-hand.”
Their joint vision is an invisible checkout, one that blends security and simplicity through a tightly integrated suite of technologies: tokenisation, Click to Pay, passkeys, and biometric authentication.
“Click-to-Pay reduces effort at checkout, while tokenisation builds trust, reduces fraud and raises approval rates by replacing stored card numbers with a secure token,” adds Singh. “And passkeys involving biometrics create simplicity.”
From the merchant side, the demand for seamless solutions is just as strong. Abbondandolo notes, “Merchants are becoming more sophisticated and looking for safe, secure payment solutions that also offer speed. And failed transactions not only represent a loss of revenue, but also a loss of consumer trust, creating further impact.”
Leveraging Mastercard’s tokenisation at scale and integrating AI, Checkout.com has helped its clients achieve improved acceptance rates, faster processing, and stronger security. But success hinges on one critical element: integration.
“As a payment company, we have to make sure the transaction is successful. Proper integration ensures the transaction is more likely to be accepted,” he says.
Beyond performance, this collaboration is shaping the infrastructure of digital commerce. Mastercard plays a foundational role as an enabler of interoperability, building standards and frameworks that can be adopted across the ecosystem by issuers, acquirers, merchants, and PSPs alike.
“You need great partners because you can’t fix this problem alone,” says Abbondandolo.
Looking ahead, Singh and Abbondandolo anticipate a market where real-time tokenisation, intelligent acceptance, and biometric verification are no longer differentiators but expectations. As the invisible checkout becomes standard, friction may finally disappear, and with it, the barriers that have long stood between intent and action.
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