Mastercard Wants to Get Rid of Card Numbers for Online Shopping

Mastercard Inc. is expanding its efforts to eliminate the use of credit card numbers when customers make purchases online in a bid to fight fraud.

A decade after it first unveiled a technology that replaces consumers’ card numbers with so-called tokens, the company is now processing 1 billion such transactions every week, Chief Executive Officer Michael Miebach said in an interview. That’s after it took the payments behemoth three years to process the first billion of such transactions.

Michael Miebach

Photographer: Prakash Singh/Bloomberg

Now, Mastercard is planning to expand the use of the technology to replace security measures like passwords with biometric data such ...