For Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, succeeding in the trillion-dollar digital-payments market is a marathon, not a sprint.
It seems clear that the technology, which replaces plastic cards with account data that customers can relay from their smartphones to a merchant with the touch of a screen, is the wave of the future. Companies from rival Visa to tech firms like Apple and Google and banks such as JPMorgan are also investing heavily in it, promoting products like Chase Pay, Apple Pay and Visa Checkout.
