Mastercard Left Libra Over Regulatory And Viability Concerns: CEO

The CEO of the payments giant is in the Libra coin news today for stating that Mastercard left the Facebook-led Libra project after the concerns about its business model and compliance. Ajay Banga, who has been the head and president of Mastercard since 2009, told Financial Times what was his attitude towards the Libra project as its members proposed linking what was supposed to be a globally inclusive currency to a proprietary digital wallet named Calibra.

“It went from this altruistic idea into their own wallet. I’m like: ‘this doesn’t sound right,’” Banga told the news.

Mastercard left Libra because of reasons which are now emerging. According to Banga, financial inclusion would mean that a government is able to pay citizens in a certain currency which they must be able to understand how to use and must be usable in day-to-day transactions for items such as food.
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“If you get paid in Libra [coin] . . . which go into Calibras, which go back into pounds to buy rice, I don’t understand how that works,” he said.

The cryptocurrency news today also show that a lack of a clear business model for Libra is what raised another red flag for Mastercard. The Libra coin news before showed that Mastercard was not the only one leaving the stablecoin project – firms like Visa and PayPal did the same at the same period.

“When you don’t understand how money gets made, it gets made in ways you don’t like,” the CEO of Mastercard said.

Once Mastercard left Libra, the company started investigating the potential use of the project. Banga appeared to have concerns when association members would also not firmly commit to the controls of data management including the know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) legislation.

Visa, on the other hand, had pulled out because the project had not been able to “satisfy all requisite regulatory expectations” as a spokesperson later confirmed. Out of the 28 founding members of the Libra project, eight have left. The British telecom conglomerate Vodafone was the last leaving in January 2020 when it decided to focus on its own digital payments service.

As Mastercard left Libra, the payments giant adopted a very cautious approach to distributed ledger technology.