Another payments company is backing off digital wallets.

MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, speaking in a fireside chat today at the JPMorgan Chase Global Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in Boston, talked mobile payments and said, “I don’t want to be in the wallet business.”

Banga said that he didn’t think MasterCard’s digital payment platform MasterPass is a digital wallet in the conventional sense. That said, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, since the service allows users to store payment cards and pay with them both online and at select point-of-sale locations in the physical world.

MasterCard won’t follow competitors like Google in betting on wallet, but will instead focus on developing a broader and more comprehensive service. The wallet space is already crowded, Banga said, and the number of branded options on checkout pages is approaching absurdity:

I just think being in the wallet business is not going to make anyone go to greatness because every merchant and every bank wants to launch their own wallet. How many wallets will be on the checkout button of a merchant’s final page? And if you try shopping on that little phone that he is holding there, how many wallets do you think you can see even though he is much younger than I am on that page; it’s just not going to work. And we just have to get to the program that says stop trying to put 200 wallets on the checkout page, it won’t work.

MasterCard is betting that MasterPass, which recently launched as a whitelabeled product with Westpac New Zealand, will be more than just a digital wallet. MasterPass has already seen adoption in 20 countries and by 40,000 merchants accepting it. Banga said that within two years, 75% of all merchants who accept MasterCard will be using MasterPass as well.

Details on the MasterPass-Westpac Deal
Westpac’s partnership with MasterCard will use MasterPass as a trial run for a custom wallet from the bank. According to MasterCard’s Australian head of market development and innovation, Matthew Barr, customers prefer digital wallets to be developed by their banks instead of a third parties like MasterCard, but an initial whitelabel rollout will benefit Westpac because it allows them to quickly and efficiently introduce customers to new and innovative technology.

Banga described MasterPass as “an omni-channel shopping experience, physical, digital, in-app.” He emphasized the importance of in-app purchases and said this would be a focus for the product going forward.

He spoke about potentially creating an open API so that app developers could access MasterPass payment data. Banga compared this MasterPass data to Yelp, but said it has a more direct impact with merchants. MasterPass data shows not only what customers like, but what they actually purchase. This data will, of course, be “anonymized” to protect customer privacy.

Banga presented MasterCard’s goal as not to be a “wallet that’s recognized by consumers at the end,” but instead as the platform providing the technology for merchants to offer innovative new services and features for their customers.

MasterCard is also working on implementing peer-to-peer payment services with MasterPass, Banga said.