Mastercard is repositioning itself as infrastructure for wallet issuance, offering tokenization, NFC provisioning, and lifecycle management as managed services rather than forcing banks and fintechs to assemble these capabilities independently. For issuer processors and program managers, this compresses time-to-market for contactless credential deployment while deepening Mastercard's embedded role in the issuance stack — a structural move that tightens network dependency at the development layer, not just the transaction layer.