Open Banking, Partnership Announcements
Partner up to scale up quickly with Mastercard Engage
In the evolving world of open banking, it’s easy for businesses to get lost in the endless possibilities. Who do we partner with to provide services at scale? How do we make it easier and faster for our fintech, merchant and lender partners to use our services? What is the most effective way to deploy the power of open banking? Mastercard today announced an expansion of its Engage partner network to help businesses decide who they can count on for technology integration of open banking services. We connect platform providers and ecosystem partners and help them provide open banking services at scale, making it easier and faster for fintech, merchant and lender clients to utilize consumer-permissioned data to offer new and improved financial services.
The Engage network offers businesses easy access to financial technology partners that can quickly build and deploy open banking services for payments and lending decisioning use cases at scale. The initial partners to join Mastercard Engage for open banking include Dwolla, FinTech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technologies, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio, Inc.
Through this new program, these providers benefit from 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.
Implementation Choices to Fit Your Needs
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 implementation options for open banking technology integration partners. The first two offerings are Partner Linked and Partner Direct. These methods provide a seamless and secure implementation of consumer-permissioned data through Mastercard’s open banking platform and can be used together or separately, depending on the preference of the financial technology provider.
Partner Linked provides broad ecosystem access, allowing business clients to quickly begin using the solutions through their preferred platform partner. This integration is an agreement with a partner and a direct agreement with the business. Engage partners can integrate to Finicity, Mastercard’s wholly-owned subsidiary with a customer-supplied access key, shielding their businesses from needing to handle user credentials. This method provides simple integration for our partners and the business contracts directly with Finicity.
Partner Direct is a reseller agreement that allows for greater customization than the Partner Linked integration, and direct access to provide business clients with a single integration for all open banking data, lending and/or payment services. Partners can directly embed and/or resell Mastercard open banking services and offer a customized experience for their business customers, wrapping additional value-added services around Mastercard’s open banking platform.
As an Engage technology partner, you can expect:
- 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 address technical questions.
Some Mastercard open banking services are delivered through Mastercard’s wholly -owned subsidiary, Finicity Corporation. Open banking services through the Engage program are launching with U.S. partners today with plans to expand globally.
Visit the Mastercard Engage website for more information, or schedule a meeting with one of our integration experts to learn more.
Certain open banking solutions are provided by Finicity, a Mastercard company.