What is Maestro and Mastercard
Mastercard is an international payment system, which Central office is in the United States, and its trade turnover in 2013 exceeded 8 trillion US dollars. It includes several brands such as MasterCard, Maestro, MasterCard Electronic, Cirrus and Mondex. This cashless payment system is represented more than in 2010 countries of the world.
Maestro is one of the services of Mastercard. It is implemented in the form of international debit cards. They have limited functionality and usually serve only to make payments in stores. Appearance card Mestro does not have specific standards, as determined by the intermediary company that produces banknote at the local level.
Key differences between Mastercard and Maestro
Names are merely a designation of the different levels of the same brand. Thus, Mastercard is a huge international Corporation which is represented in more than two hundred countries in the world, and Maestro is one of the most popular services.
The history of Mastercard counts from the far 1966, long before the advent of electronic payments. At that time, as a service Maesto was created in 1990, just to gain a new market of cashless payments.
Visually, the logos of MasterCard and Maestro are very similar, as they have relation to the same Corporation. The logo of the group consists of two slightly overlapping circles of red and yellow, with the inscription on them is "MasterCard". The logo of the payment system has similar design with the inscription "Maestro" on the same two circles, but the circles of other colors – blue and red.
For operations using Maestro valid only online authorization. That is, for calculations using this payment card, it is necessary to conduct a magnetic strip in the terminal point, then the cardholder must confirm the payment using your PIN or signature on the cheque. At that time, as access to other services Mastercard is possible using offline authorization.
