One of the biggest benefits of a thriving digital payments industry is its ability to expand financial inclusion, Kirkpatrick said. That is the concept of bringing more people into the formal financial system, thereby expanding their opportunities and boosting their prosperity.
Expanding financial inclusion allows more people to open financial accounts, start businesses, make and receive payments, save and transfer money, and access loans.
To bring these benefits to more people, Mastercard is currently working toward its long-term goal of connecting 1 billion people and 50 million small businesses to the digital economy by 2025.
“For us, financial inclusion is not just the right thing to do for society,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s also good for our business.”
He added that Mastercard continually invests in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and new payment technologies to empower and protect small businesses and people entering the digital economy for the first time.
Their perspectives were reinforced during a roundtable discussion, which included small business owner Rahama Wright and Carl Holshouser, executive vice president of the trade association. technetand Carrie Hunt, director of advocacy for United States Credit Unions.
Wright, who runs the D.C.-based company Shea Yeleen Skin Care Company, said he couldn’t run his business without digital payments. With small businesses powering nearly all local economies and employing millions of people across the United States, supporting digital payments is an essential way to support small businesses, she added.
“That’s what drives our ability to get paid quickly, quickly and securely,” he said. “If we want to say we support small businesses, help us make money faster, and that’s what digital payments allow us to do.”
Credit unions, which are nonprofit organizations, also need digital payments because their customers depend on them, Hunt said. The United States needs innovation to stay ahead of the scammers and remain globally competitive, Holshouser said. Excessive regulation would restrict that. “Bureaucracy never created any of the innovations we’re seeing,” she said.
McHenry said his work in Congress to support technology companies and startup capital is motivated by his father’s story. He said the best way to harness that entrepreneurial spirit is to encourage more partnerships between fintechs and banks, promote digital payments and support legislation on digital assets and stablecoins.
“We need to unlock that potential,” McHenry said. “And that will help the bank, yes. It will help economic growth. But it also helps people be more capable of taking risks.”
He added that he keeps the old Master Charge card that his father used to help start his family’s business.
“Now my brother takes over. He employs a few hundred people,” he said. “So he has grown. He has grown quite a bit, but the first part of the external debt or equity came from Mastercard.”
Header photo: Rahama Wright, second from left, the entrepreneur who founded skin care brand Shea Yeleen, with Carrie Hunt, left, chief advancement officer at America’s Credit Unions, Carl Holshouser, executive vice president of TechNet, second from the right, and Punchbowl. Anna Palmer, executive news director, right.