Highnote has become the latest Mastercard Engage partner. As a qualified technology partner within the Mastercard Engage network, Highnote can help businesses quickly build and deploy embedded finance solutions at scale. Through this partnership, cardholders can initiate transfers directly in and out of card products powered by Highnote.
This partnership additionally enables customers to not only take advantage of Highnote’s industry-leading ACH origination, card issuance, and money movement capabilities but also instantly verify cardholders’ accounts, with their permission.
“The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital payments through embedded finance,” says Mastercard’s EVP, U.S. Open Banking, Andy Sheehan. We see this partnership as an excellent opportunity to give consumers and businesses more choice in how they pay for goods and services. We’re thrilled to bring together Highnote and Mastercard teams to allow enterprises to seamlessly embed payments into their existing digital products.”
Take a deeper dive into the innovation of this partnership here.
Mastercard has partnered with upSWOT, a U.S.-based white-label embedded financial platform, to add data for small businesses on upSWOT’s platform.
With the addition of owner-permissioned data from Mastercard’s open banking platform, upSWOT now gives small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the ability to link financial data to 200 API-enabled apps. These include accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), payroll, ecommerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing, and POS business applications.
With this partnership, Mastercard and upSWOT will be able to provide SMBs with a smooth and effective approach to run their operations.
Read more about this innovative partnership here.
Consumer-permissioned data is transforming financial services across virtually all industry segments and geographies.
Ryan Beaudry, SVP, Open Banking Product & Engineering at Mastercard, discusses the need and the vision to deliver both a trusted experience and a platform for innovation, empowering consumers to benefit from their data and powering financial services providers as they reimagine the money experience.
To learn more, visit https://www.finicity.com/open-banking. To request a demo, visit https://www.finicity.com/fintech-demo.
OPEN, EMBEDDED, MODULAR, AND ON A PLATFORM
The rapidly-evolving space of open banking, embedded finance, modular banking and banking as a platform is driving innovators with an API mindset, and the future will see more and more public-facing consumer brands embrace APIs across many industries.
A new report from Mastercard Data & Services looks at the relationship between BaaS and open banking, an aggregated approach to BaaS as it evolves into hosted marketplaces and ecosystems and how banks and fintechs can enable BaaS at scale.
Read the full report here.
With the industry’s rapid adoption of integrative banking frameworks such as consumer-permissioned data access and digital tools, Amount has been selected by Mastercard to help spur innovation across lending, payments and financial management. Through the Engage partner network, Amount now offers new services to its SMB and consumer banking clients that use Mastercard’s open banking capabilities to verify information quickly, including identity, cashflow, checking or savings, and income verification.
“We are proud to partner with Mastercard as part of our effort to progress the financial services landscape forward to a more comprehensive and inclusive open banking system,” says Adam Hughes, CEO of Amount.
Read the full announcement here.
Launched by J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard, Pay-by-Bank is an ACH payment that uses open banking, which enables consumers to permission their financial data to be shared seamlessly between trusted parties to let them pay bills directly from their bank account with greater security. No longer will they be faced with the tedium of typing in routing and account numbers each time they need to pay a bill. For billers and merchants, it automates consumer onboarding and reduces the risk and cost of storing bank account information.
Pay-by-Bank holds huge potential for billers to take the pain out of recurring payments such as rent, utilities, payments to government, tuition, insurance, and health care where ACH is the primary medium of payment.
Read more about this secure, streamlined open banking innovation here.
In today’s digital age, consumers have come to expect experiences that are quick, convenient and easy to use. These expectations are exerting more pressure on the mortgage lending process and causing many lenders to rethink their current workflows and customer experience.
Here, we discuss the effects that open banking and real-time data are having on mortgage lending, and how industry innovators are using this data to streamline homebuying for both lenders and borrowers. Join us to talk about the impact of Freddie Mac’s release of automated assessment of direct deposit income, insights into how the leveraging of new data sources will impact future underwriting and how lenders like Intercoastal Mortgage are already utilizing these tools to win in a tightening market.
To learn more, visit https://www.finicity.com/mortgage. To request a demo, visit https://www.finicity.com/mortgage-demo.
Once driven by early adopters like fintechs and tech enthusiasts, open banking is increasingly becoming embedded into the global financial landscape online and through apps from players across the ecosystem. And it is only expected to grow. From 2021 to 2026, the number of open banking users is expected to increase nearly eightfold. And instant payment flows enabled by open banking are expected to increase by 30 times.
Open banking allows for all boats to rise — including merchants, fintech innovators, large and small financial service providers and, most importantly, consumers and small businesses.
Jess Turner, Executive Vice President, Open Banking and API at Mastercard talks about the choice, innovation and inclusion in open banking that is lifting up opportunities across the entire ecosystem. Read here for more.
Jack Henry™ (Nasdaq: JKHY) announced an expansion of its existing relationship with Mastercard® that will enable credit unions and banks to provide their accountholders the ability to securely see all of their financial accounts – within and outside their primary financial institution – in one place. Together, the companies establish a partnership that makes secure, API-based data-gathering affordable for community and regional financial institutions.
Through this collaboration, financial institutions can offer their accountholders secure access to external providers and financial data — consolidating, categorizing and enriching that data in a simplified digital experience.
Read more about this expanded partnership here.
Getting a mortgage has traditionally been a long and challenging process. Customers have had to dig up paystubs and bank statements to hand off to loan officers. Loan officers and processors then manually uploaded the paperwork into the lender’s database for review and then hope for the best. When a borrower sent an incomplete document or a processor made an error in data transposition, it could delay the loan approval process by days, even weeks.
But in today’s climate of rising interest rates and low inventory, those long wait times have gone from just annoying to potentially costing house hunters the chance to close on the homes they desire. For example, serious buyers should arrive at each showing with a pre-approval letter in hand, in order to be competitive. Even those just browsing will need to move quickly if the right house comes up. And those refinancing—yes, even as rates are climbing, there are borrowers who could save by refinancing—must act fast to nail the lower rate in place.
These inefficiencies and delays were troubling to Guaranteed Rate, who, as the second-largest retail lender in the U.S., has been helping to make the mortgage process easier since 2000.
Two years ago the company decided to look into taking its underwriting process digital. There was a lot on the line. The mortgage industry sets a high bar for the financial data used to underwrite loans, requiring documents from verified institutions. What’s more, borrowers share some of their most sensitive financial information to secure a loan. Guaranteed Rate was committed to protecting the consumer’s privacy and financial data.
What Guaranteed Rate came up with is a platform that enables customers to go online or use a mobile app to grant permission for the lender via a third-party service to access their financial and payroll accounts. That lets the lender quickly and accurately verify assets, income and employment.
If everything checks out, the lender can give the borrower a quick thumbs-up. In some cases, that’s all the data the lender needs for the mortgage to go forward. This digital verification process can cut up to eight days off the underwriting process. “From an efficiency standpoint, our underwriters don’t have to manually verify income and assets for every loan, so we can scale up,” says Brad Lando, Senior Vice President of Strategic Development, Guaranteed Rate.
The company protects borrowers’ sensitive data by using Mastercard’s open banking platform. When a borrower grants a lender access to their data, Mastercard’s technology issues a token. The token allows the lender to see the data, but never house it. Nor does the lender receive login credentials. The risk of those credentials being hacked during the mortgage process is reduced, and the customer gets a better experience.
Another advantage is that borrowers can grant ongoing account access for prolonged periods of time, such as 60 days. That means the lender can refresh the data as needed without having to go back and ask for renewed permission to track down more documents, alleviating the burden on the consumer. “It’s cut down on risk, in addition to bringing a better customer experience,” says Lando.
Loan officers and processors have been quick to adapt to this digital-first method. The automated verification system allows them to sign off faster on more straightforward loans, which frees them up to focus on the more complicated ones.
And while there’s still some trepidation among consumers, they’re also starting to see the benefits. When offered a choice to manually upload their documents or grant permission for the lender to pull their information, 83% of borrowers who chose the digital path said their loan processing time was shorter than they expected it to be, or that it met their expectations.
As digital verification becomes more prevalent, the mortgage process will speed up, from application to close. And that means more people can look forward to a smoother process on the way to landing in the homes they want to live in.