Mastercard has opened a second office building at its Leopardstown campus, expanding its European Tech Hub in Dublin. It places payments engineering for security and network resilience in a larger Dublin base, alongside the group’s move to process domestic European transactions inside Europe.

Mastercard is an NYSE-listed payments technology company operating in more than 200 countries and territories. It established its Dublin operation in 2008 with 36 employees and now has more than 2,000 technologists there.

The new building, Two South County, was opened by Taoiseach Micheál Martin alongside Mastercard chief executive Michael Miebach and senior executives. Dublin teams helped develop the tokenisation platform behind wallet payments and now work on agentic commerce, quantum-resilient payments, digital security and network resilience.

Mastercard also announced that it has started processing domestic transactions in France, Germany and Spain through new European infrastructure, with more countries to follow from next year and all components of local transactions in Europe targeted by 2030.

All new European Mastercard cards and acquirer-powered terminals from next year must support offline payments, so people can keep buying essentials during internet outages and power cuts.

The group is also investing to keep the primary copy of intra-EEA transaction data in Europe, and is recruiting a third independent European board member who will chair the Mastercard Europe board.

Kelly Devine, president of Mastercard Europe, said: “This expansion underlines our focus on turning innovation into secure, resilient payment experiences that customers can rely on.”

IDA Ireland chief executive Michael Lohan said: “This latest investment positions the Dublin team to play an even greater role in developing exciting new technologies that will shape the future of payments, while further strengthening Ireland’s thriving financial services sector.”

The campus has expanded in stages. Breaking News reported that an earlier plan, announced under then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, targeted 1,500 jobs over three to five years across One and Two South County, when the workforce stood above 650.

For the sector, tying a technology hub expansion to localised processing and offline payment requirements signals that payment networks are treating infrastructure resilience as an engineering workload, not only a compliance one.

Source: RTÉ / Mastercard / Breaking News