Mastercard, City Union Bank pilot ‘One Credential’ payments in India
Mastercard and City Union Bank have launched an India pilot for One Credential, a tokenized primary card that can link multiple consumer and SME payment accounts and route transactions according to preset preferences.
What happened
Mastercard and City Union Bank launched an India pilot of One Credential, a tokenized primary card that links multiple consumer and SME payment accounts and
Key facts
- 200+ countries and territories
Why this matters
Banks, wallets, and merchant acquirers should assess partnerships around multi-account credentialing before Mastercard’s model becomes a broader interoperability standard.
What to watch
- Pilot expansion beyond City Union Bank customers, including additional issuer banks or card portfolios.
- RBI guidance or approvals affecting tokenized credentials, customer consent, card-account linkage and transaction routing.
- Evidence that the credential can route between personal, business, debit, credit and prepaid accounts in real time.
- Merchant-category and transaction-level routing capabilities rather than simple user-selected default accounts.
- Launch of SME controls such as employee cards, approval workflows, spend limits and accounting reconciliation.
- Adoption metrics: activated credentials, transactions per credential, linked-account count, authorization success rates and fraud losses.
- Competitive responses from Visa, RuPay, UPI-enabled banks, large private-sector banks and wallet providers.
- Mastercard and City Union Bank add merchant-category, transaction-value and account-balance routing rules to the pilot.
- Participating customers receive app-based controls for preferred funding source, spending caps, temporary credential freezes and SME employee access.
- Competing Indian issuers and card networks test multi-account cards, wallet-based credential management and UPI-card convergence.
- Banks position consolidated credentials as a retention tool, tying them to premium accounts, working-capital products and rewards programs.
- Fintechs seek API partnerships to embed payment-source routing into expense-management and business-banking platforms.