How to Accelerate Innovation and Adoption of Open Banking? Engage Strong Partners

Mastercard announced an expansion of its Engage partner network to include its open banking services, offering customers easy access to several technology partners that can quickly build and deploy open banking solutions for payments and lending decisioning at scale. According to Mastercard’s 2022 New Payment Index, 83% of consumers globally use digital tools for at least one financial task, and more than half use technology for five or more tasks. With the rapid adoption of open banking (i.e., consumer-permissioned data access) and digital tools across financial services experiences, Mastercard will work with technology partners to spur innovation through access to its open banking platform, from lending to payments to financial management.

The initial partners to join the Mastercard Engage program for open banking include Dwolla, FinTech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technology, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio, Inc. Through this new program, these providers will partner with Mastercard open banking to offer services to their clients. Other benefits are fewer contracts, faster access to customers, data security and access, and overall flexibility to better leverage Mastercard’s robust open banking services.

Mastercard has a long-standing track record of working with technology and fintech partners to build the future of financial services and enable more choices for consumers. With three billion cardholders and 93 million merchants, the more partners Mastercard has, the more powerful the flywheel of our network becomes. Since 2018, nearly 150 partners around the world have joined the Mastercard Engage program. In the last year alone, nearly 100 Engage partners have helped their customers deploy new, innovative solutions on more than 250 million accounts with Mastercard digital services, including all-digital consumer payments experiences, tokenization, digital wallet, mobile POS solutions and now open banking.

“The partners joining Mastercard Engage are leading the deployment of open banking solutions that are designed with security at the center and will help to meet consumers’ financial needs and enable choice,” said Jess Turner, executive vice president, Global Open Banking and API at Mastercard. “Together we can enable innovation that will increase financial inclusion and expand access to digital services across the globe.”

Open banking through Mastercard and its technology partners allows businesses to establish direct consumer-permissioned connections with their customers’ bank accounts. Through these consumer-permissioned connections, businesses can verify accounts for payments and payouts, check balances to reduce payment failures, and cut fraud by confirming bank account ownership. This has improved the payment experience for both the businesses and their customers. Similarly for lending, borrowers can directly permission data and insights through the ecosystem to support their lending decisioning processes. This also means a better lending experience for both the lender and borrower, as it provides financial insights, expanded data sets not available through paper submissions, increased financial inclusion, and a simplified experience.

The Engage program provides two new direct implementation options for partners — Partner Linked and Partner Direct. These methods provide a seamless and secure implementation of consumer-permissioned data through Mastercard’s open banking services and can be used together or separately, depending on the preference of the financial technology provider.

As an Engage technology partner, additional benefits include:

• Go-to-market collaboration – Helps technology providers sell and deploy their solution in new markets and find new customers.
• Promotion – Partners are featured on Mastercard’s portal to gain visibility and credibility with all Mastercard customers.
• Training & insights – Mastercard Academy gives partners access to a series of product and solution training sessions. They can also participate in regional forums with insights from Mastercard and its partners around value and product propositions as well as market priorities.
• Technical support – Partners gain access to a network of global and regional technical engineers that can help them address technical questions.

Mastercard Engage expanded last year to support customers in deploying Digital First experiences that meet consumer demand for more digital experiences and provide more choice in payment options. The program includes partners that offer various components and integration capabilities across all business verticals, serving banks, merchants, lenders and fintech customers. Continuing the momentum from the launch of the Start Path Open Banking program last month, the expansion of Engage further demonstrates Mastercard’s dedication to supporting fintechs that are enabling consumers to securely access and manage their data.

Some Mastercard open banking platform services are delivered through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Finicity. Open banking services through the Engage is a global program, additional partners across markets will be announced in coming months.

“Data is a crucial element of the Open Banking movement across the globe,” said Dwolla President and COO, Dave Glaser. “At Dwolla, we’re focused on powering innovations with sophisticated account-to-account payment solutions and our partnership with Mastercard complements our open banking strategies to help increase the capabilities of the payment experience to our network of businesses.”

“As we move from the information to the digital age, how we move information is as important as the data itself,” said David Park, CEO at Fintech Automation. “Mastercard and FinTech Automation are key to that movement.”

“We’re delighted to be among the first Mastercard Engage open banking network partners to enable providers to expand consumer access to credit by unlocking permissioned based use of open banking data,” said Ava Kelly, Chief Product Officer at i2c Inc.

“Link is on a mission to help businesses significantly reduce payment costs. We are thrilled to engage in a strategic partnership with Mastercard,” said Eric Shoykhet, Co-Founder at Link Financial Technologies, Inc. “Turbocharged by Mastercard open banking platform enabling access to consumer permissioned data, Link offers cost-effective alternate payment solutions.”

“LoanPro is honored to be a Mastercard Engage partner. As the leading API first loan management and servicing technology, our customers depend on and trust our loan management platform to monitor, optimize and defend their extended capital. We view the Mastercard engage program as a promising channel to accelerate technology partnerships, expand our capability to new customers, and introduce new capabilities to our existing client base,” said Rhett Roberts CEO/Co-Founder LoanPro

“Open banking has tremendous potential to better empower consumers underserved by the traditional credit system. This partnership enables lenders to seamlessly access new risk insights for more predictive underwriting while providing consumers more control and transparency to manage their financial lives,” says Chris Hansen, Head of Channels & Alliances at Nova Credit. “Together, we are taking another step forward in accelerating the inevitable shift toward a more inclusive financial system.”

“We’re excited to help organizations embrace open banking and propel faster innovation by expanding our relationship with Mastercard,” said Carol Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions for Provenir.“Provenir powers risk decisioning processes across identity, credit and fraud. Through the unique combination of Provenir’s data marketplace, purpose-built machine learning models and on-demand decisioning, Provenir provides a cohesive risk ecosystem that enables organizations to make smarter decisions across the entire customer lifecycle while elevating fraud prevention and financial inclusion. Organizations choose this platform to accelerate the launch of products such as Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), small and mid-size enterprise lending, automotive financing, and more.”

“Synctera was founded to help builders everywhere challenge the traditional developer landscape and make building the future of FinTech fast and simple,” said Peter Hazlehurst, co-founder and CEO at Synctera. “Expanding Mastercard’s Engage program is a catalyst for better FinTech creation and adoption that will help people get better access to better financial services. We’re proud to work alongside Mastercard to change the way America banks, invests, and spends money.”

“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with Mastercard and take full advantage of their Open Banking product suite. Their unmatched tools, support, and technology are essential to Tern delivering best-in-class fintech solutions worldwide,” said Brion Bonkowski, Chief Executive Officer at Tern.

“Usio has been a Mastercard partner for several years and we are thrilled to continue to grow our relationship by participating in their Engage open banking program. Our relationship is based on our ability to provide flawless execution and timely response to client requirements that both preserve and enhance Mastercard’s reputation for outstanding service,” said Louis Hoch, President and CEO at Usio. “As a member of the Engage partner network, our goal is to build on this foundation by supporting the Mastercard open banking solutions with electronic payments technology that help meet consumers’ financial needs and enable customer choice in a secure, reliable manner.”

Source: Mastercard