Timothée Badin works on Mastercard’s digital solutions: everything that happens when people pay online. He is from Paris and has lived in Stockholm for nine years, to the day. He asked the room to interrupt him, and it did.
He started with how Swedes like to pay. For online shopping in general, 32% prefer a card. For travel and hospitality, the figure is 72%. Cards work anywhere in the world. They protect larger purchases, since you can dispute a charge with your bank. And they often earn points.
Twenty years of typing
The problem is the experience. Paying by card online has barely changed in 20 years: 16 digits, an expiry date, a security code. Most people do not know their card details by heart, and many would rather not get up from the sofa to find their wallet. 17% of consumers have abandoned an order because the checkout was too long or complicated. Some come back. Some book elsewhere.
Saved cards and wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay help. But more than half of consumers prefer to check out as guests, especially in travel, and not everyone has the right card in their wallet.
One person in the audience had given up physical cards altogether. When a checkout asks for the card number, they buy somewhere else.
Click to Pay
The card schemes, including Mastercard, Visa and American Express, answered with Click to Pay. A guest chooses to pay by card, and their saved cards appear, recognized by email address or browser. They pick one, authenticate and pay. No typing. Behind it, a token stands in for the real card number, so neither the merchant nor the payment provider holds it.
Guests can sign up in their bank app (80% of Nordic banks that issue Mastercard offer it) or while paying. It works on any device, including for a bill paid through a payment link after the stay. Airlines such as Norwegian and Lufthansa, and rail operators VR and SJ, already accept it. Mastercard’s goal is to take the real card number off the internet by 2030.
Passkeys
The second point of friction is authentication: one-time codes, or switching to BankID and back while the payment page loads. Passkeys keep it in the page. The guest confirms with a face or fingerprint, right at checkout. 53% of consumers say passkeys are more convenient and more secure than passwords.
When agents pay
Then there are AI agents that book on a guest’s behalf. Timothée showed a proof of concept built with Nets by Nexi and other partners: a family booking theme park tickets and parking through a chat on the park’s website, paid with a saved card and a fingerprint.
For banks, the key question is whether a person or an agent made the purchase. Mastercard’s Agent Pay framework vets agents the way it vets merchants, requires tokens and strong authentication, and records what the guest asked for. If an agent books three tickets instead of four, there is a trail to settle the dispute. Purchases the guest confirms in the moment fit Europe’s consumer rules today. Fully autonomous ones are still being worked out.
Challenge your checkout
His closing advice was plain. Revisit your checkout. How do your guests pay? What can they use? How does it feel from start to finish? Then challenge your payment provider. More payments completed means more revenue.
A good first step: book your own product on your phone, as a guest would, and count the steps.