There was a time when accepting payments felt like the easy part for retailers. A customer swiped their card, a terminal blinked, and the sale moved through.
But commerce is no longer straightforward. Every year, many retailers and other ecosystem players have to keep up with new forms of payment like digital wallets, evolving cybersecurity and fraud threats, or emerging trends like agentic commerce.
Mastercard designed its new all-in-one platform, Merchant Cloud, to help combat those rising challenges by unifying the company’s leading services to give businesses a single place to manage acceptance, security, alternative payments, and fraud detection.
“We kept hearing the same message from Canadian merchants: they needed relief from complexity.”
“We kept hearing the same message from Canadian merchants: they needed relief from complexity,” said Balinder Ahluwalia, Mastercard’s Senior Vice President and Head of Market Development and Digital Partnerships in Canada. “They wanted one environment they could trust for payments, security, and scale.”
While Merchant Cloud responds to the needs of retailers, it’s also built for the players that sit behind every transaction, like banks (which often act as acquirers or issuers), payment service providers (think of a third-party company that lets businesses accept digital payments), and software vendors whose products support commerce.
Here are three areas where Merchant Cloud aims to improve payments for Canadian businesses.
The strain of fragmented payment systems
Merchant Cloud grew out of conversations Mastercard was having with businesses around the world. For example, the company heard from merchants, including those in Canada, that needed stronger fraud protection, higher approval performance, and fewer chargebacks.
The problem was that each goal often required its own vendor, integration, and maintenance cycle.
“Merchants often run a mix of physical, online, and mobile channels,” Ahluwalia said. “Each channel carries unique standards and security needs, which can create friction that grows as more tools are added to the stack.”
This complex tech stack is expected to get more complicated. By 2029, close to 70 percent of global e-commerce transactions are forecast to be made using alternative payment methods, such as digital wallets or QR codes, according to a study from Juniper Research.
Merchant Cloud pulls Mastercard’s payment services into a single cloud platform designed to reduce the operational lift of multiple systems. Instead of assembling separate platforms for acceptance, gateway services, tokenization, authentication, and security, merchants and their partners can connect to one modular environment that manages the infrastructure behind those tasks.
Fraud that hides in plain sight
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Canadians lost approximately $645 million to fraud in 2024, and $544 million as of September 30, 2025. As digital commerce gets more sophisticated, so have attacks. Organizations across the payments ecosystem have begun to see emerging new threats like synthetic identity theft, where criminals combine real and fake personal information to create fictitious identities, and card-not-present schemes, which involve using stolen card information for remote purchases.
“The most surprising thing for many teams is how subtle modern fraud can look. The signals are almost invisible until the damage is done.”
Fraud patterns often shift too quickly for merchants to catch themselves, especially if their payments teams are small.
To address that, Merchant Cloud incorporates AI models that scan large volumes of anonymized transactions to help identify early signals of suspicious behaviour. The models adjust risk scores as fraud patterns change, which aims to support steadier approval performance and potentially fewer declines or chargebacks. The automation also helps merchants keep their payment flows stable with minimal additional work.
“The most surprising thing for many teams is how subtle modern fraud can look,” Ahluwalia said. “The signals are almost invisible until the damage is done. That’s where real-time models can make a difference.”
Merchant Cloud also integrates tokenization directly into its architecture, which gives merchants a way to help reduce their exposure. This means that sensitive card details are replaced with generated secure tokens.
“Tokenization is not a new idea, but building it into the core of the platform means merchants typically no longer have to architect their systems around it,” Ahluwalia said. “With Merchant Cloud, it’s already there doing the work.”
The complexity of going global
International expansion is on the priority list for many Canadian companies, and a 2024 survey by Statistics Canada found that receiving a payment from foreign buyers or partners is a difficulty reported by Canadian businesses when exporting.
Since exporting businesses often enter new regions before building local teams, they typically rely on infrastructure that can adapt to local rules and systems. Merchant Cloud connects merchants to over 240 global acquirers and more than 35 payment types. It also offers localized compliance support, helping make international expansion more manageable for companies that need reliable payment performance across borders.
“We often see companies testing demand in three regions at once,” Ahluwalia said. “They often can’t afford three separate payment builds. They need one foundation that holds.”
The future Mastercard is planning for
Mastercard expects shopping to keep blending online and in-store experiences, with more people potentially using a wider mix of payment options. As Canadian merchants look for more reliable approvals and stronger protection against fraud, the company sees Merchant Cloud as a system to help support those changes in Canada.
“Canadian businesses move quickly,” Ahluwalia said. “Their payment systems might need help to keep that pace. Merchant Cloud is designed to give them room to grow while helping minimize operational weight.”
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Feature image courtesy Blake Wisz via Unsplash.