Unlikely. What will end up happening is that MasterCard will be making money from this deal, which will incentivize it to either drop merchant fees (leading to merchant offers for buyers to use MasterCard) or increase card member benefits to get more data to sell, which will make people use MasterCard cards more.

The average buyer would rather get cash back to allow Google to report to merchants how their ads resulted in credit card payments than to not get cash back and hide this information. This is the same economics for how loyalty card programs work.

Yeah, this is like them stepping into my house. This whole time they’ve been peering through every window but now, they’ve let themselves in.

Financial crime risks?