Dublin City Hall. Image: Diego Shruberry/Shutterstock
Mastercard and Dublin City Council have some exciting plans to make the city smarter.
At last week’s Smart City Expo in Barcelona, Dublin City Council (DCC) and Mastercard announced plans to collaborate on a three-year innovation partnership to aid in Dublin city planning as part of the extensive Smart Dublin programme.
Mastercard will develop its SpendingPulse reports to be released as part of the the Quarterly Economic Monitor published by the DCC. Insights on retail spending and tourism patterns drawn from aggregated and anonymised transaction data, as well as cash and cheque payments, will help Dublin to foster new insights on the spending patterns of its citizens and many tourists.
‘Dublin is leading the way in harnessing the power of big data to help run the city more efficiently, advance tourism, and to better understand the economic trends and behaviour of its residents and visitors’
– JASON LALOR
As well as the rich banks of data the SpendingPulse reports will provide, Mastercard is also committing to driving innovation opportunities in transit, planning and tourism, and will also engage with Dublin’s flourishing start-up community.
Expertise and innovation from Mastercard
Jason Lalor, country manager at Mastercard Ireland, said that Dublin is a big data pioneer. “Dublin is leading the way in harnessing the power of big data to help run the city more efficiently, advance tourism, and to better understand the economic trends and behaviour of its residents and visitors.
“Mastercard is delighted to bring our expertise and innovation capacity to help the city use our data to plan better economic policies and interventions that will improve its overall economic performance.”
Much of Mastercard’s planned initiatives are created in its Dublin office through its research and development group, where technologists design and test new payment methods. These include Qkr, an API that enables users to pay with their smartphones by linking them to their card details, all secured by Masterpass protocols.
Clever use of private sector data
DCC chief executive Owen Keegan said: “This unique partnership with Mastercard will allow Dublin [to] develop up-to-date insights on its economic performance at a time when we face a number of external threats such as Brexit.”
He continued, praising the application of this data and its role in the future plans for the city: “This is a great example of private sector data being used for smarter purposes and supporting future city planning. We look forward to also exploring new cashless innovations in Dublin while also engaging with the local start-up ecosystem in this process.”
