Payments Patent Wrap: MC Wants To Take The Where In Wearables And Add A Who

In this week's look at interesting payments patents issued and/or applied for, MasterCard is our guest of honor for a pair of patent applications, a little patent pending power. MasterCard on Feb. 11 applied for this patent as a way to better authenticate anyone trying to make a purchase via a wearable device. The idea starts with the system grabbing a reference sample related to the cardholder and payment card info.

In another patent application, MasterCard wants to use mobile purchases to dictate--in realtime--what news stories the shopper will be shown.