MasterCard already has an office in Dublin thanks to the $100 million acquisition of Orbiscom in 2008. The site is one of the firm's four main MasterCard Labs research and development centres, and is home to CIO Garry Lyons, formally Orbiscom chief.

The card giant's new office will boost its headcount in the city from around 70 to 200 over the next four years. Having secured backing from IDA Ireland, recruitment for technology roles is already underway.

The office will be a centre of excellence for Java development, one of the predominant programming languages for e-commerce and mobile payments. In addition, the team looking after the inControl platform - which lets customers set custom controls on usage of their cards - will now be based at the site.

Rob Reeg, president, MasterCard Technologies, says: "At our core, MasterCard is a technology company that happens to be in the payments space. Our focus as a company is on offering innovative, game-changing technologies that offer mass appeal for our global customers and cardholders. We're confident that this larger office in Dublin, as well as the new technology team members that we plan to hire, will help further our technology agenda and innovation vision."