The Chief Executive Officer of Mastercard Ajay Banga in an interview with the Financial Times explained why the American multinational financial services corporation decided to quit the Libra Association.
According to Banga, the association’s key members could not give a clear answer on whether the social network would integrate the KYC due diligence, fight with money laundering, store users' data or not.
"Every time you talked to the main proponents of Libra, I said ‘Would you put that in writing?’ They wouldn’t," expressed Banga.
Mastercard CEO also admits he does not fully understand the way how Libra plans to monetize its business:
"When you don’t understand how money gets made, it gets made in ways you don’t like. For financial inclusion, the government has got to pay you in this [currency], you’ve got to receive it as an instrument you can understand, and you have to be able to use it to buy rice and cycles. 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," said Banga.
Mastercard was not the only tech giant that decided to leave the Libra Association in October 2019. Visa, PayPal, and Stripe, which in the past have shown their willingness to support Facebook's crypto project, also decided to quit the association as they were not convinced of the necessity to officially support the association.
Earlier iHodl reported Mastercard entered into a collaboration with Envisible, a company that is focused on supply-chain visibility in food systems, to track food supply with the help of the blockchain technology.
Access more than 50 of the world's financial markets directly from your EXANTE account – including NASDAQ, London Stock Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest crypto and blockchain news.