“We are always seeking to enhance our user’s shopping experience in a secure and simple manner and this latest release does that by leveraging the growing Masterpass network,” sais Will White, partner group program manager, Microsoft. “We will continue to seek opportunities to enhance the shopping experience by leveraging standards and working with innovative partners like Mastercard.” The powerful functionality should be available to U.S. users immediately, but it still has one major limitation. At the time of writing, Microsoft Pay only works with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 devices.
Major Limitations
The latest statistics put Edge at just 5% versus Google Chrome’s 64% and Firefox’s 10. It seems unlikely that Microsoft Pay will ever take off in a significant way unless it gets an addon for other browsers, and it’s not clear if that’s even possible. Whatever the case, the collaboration with Mastercard moves the capabilities outside of Microsoft’s first-party services and into the wider world. Mastercard has touted plans to continue to work with Microsoft on shopping experiences, so we could see availability in more countries soon. If you both use Edge and live in the U.S., you can link your Microsoft account to Masterpass here.
