During a press conference on Friday, Mastercard and PSP announced a strategic cooperation. As part of the partnership the Blik operator will provide a convenient online payment platform. Mastercard, on their part, will allow Blik users to benefit from contactless technologies in all points of sale around the world that accept contactless Mastercard payments as soon as the second half of 2019. It will be possible with the use of the Mastercard Digital Enablement Services (MDES) tokenization service. Contactless Blik will work on Android and iOS smartphones.

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In addition to that, Mastercard and PSP will allow Blik users to make payments at foreign online retailers using a standard recently published by EMVCo called Secure Remote Commerce (SRC), as soon as the solution becomes available. This will allow users to use Blik wile shopping at e-commerce businesses from other countries. Both partners will also cooperate on expanding Blik to foreign markets.

During the conference we also found out that Mastercard will actually invest in Blik. Mastercard's General Manager Bartosz Ciołkowski didn't reveal any more details on that matter. PSP's Dariusz Mazurkiewicz said that cooperating with banks in Poland is strategically important for the company and will remain so in the future, which could suggest that the American card company will become a minority shareholder at PSP.

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We have been hearing about Blik allowing contactless payments almost since the system's launch. The plans were not being implemented, though, because the technology behind contactless payments is patented by Mastercard, among others. This latest announcement eliminates that problem. My only doubt is in terms of how the Blik contactless app payments will differ from transactions with the same banking app but using a mobile HCE card - and whether the customers will avoid confusion.