Open Banking Archives

In partnership with Mastercard Open Banking, with services provided by Finicity, a Mastercard company, Fannie Mae continues to work toward improving access to affordable housing with secure banking-powered technologies, speeding up the application process for lenders and reducing the need for manual document preparation.

In addition to helping lenders validate assets and assess a borrower’s rent payment history and cash flow, Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter® (DU®) validation service gives lenders the power to verify a borrowers’ income and employment information using a single 12-month asset report. This digital enhancement is saving lenders time while enhancing the borrower experience.

Demand for a better mortgage process

Traditionally, borrowers have been asked to manually collect and share stacks of sensitive income documents with mortgage loan officers, a time-consuming and less secure process that creates inefficiency for both the borrower and the lender.

A complete digital verification solution for mortgage lenders

DU provides a digital option that simplifies and removes friction from the application process. When applying for a mortgage, borrowers can access Finicity’s user-friendly Connect consent flow to link their bank accounts, enabling their data to be easily shared with the lender.

With one report from Finicity, DU can help lenders validate a borrower’s asset, income and employment information while simultaneously analyzing cash flow and rent payment history to help approve more potential homeowners.

All the verifications needed to process a mortgage application can be conducted on the spot, without paperwork.

Fannie Mae’s latest innovation leverages Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) from Finicity as a leading report supplier to power the verifications needed to process a mortgage application.

Fannie Mae’s Digital Verification Solution requires an asset report of 12 months or more to run
Lenders must request that this feature be turned on

“With Desktop Underwriter® (DU®), lenders can now get even more benefits from using a single 12-month asset report. We continue to look for ways to help lenders streamline their validation processes and improve the borrower experience, and this latest enhancement helps them do just that.”
Peter Skarnulis, Fannie Mae Vice President, Business Account Management Solutions

Want to elevate your efficiency while enhancing the customer lending journey? Get started today.

The next generation wants control over their data for a more transparent lending experience

Having grown up with the internet, smart phones, and social media, young Millennials and Gen-Z borrowers are particularly savvy about using their digital footprints for their own benefit.

They embrace technology to streamline everyday tasks and they want to make informed decisions about transactions. As they increase their presence in the workforce, they are becoming the generations poised to drive the future of lending. 

When Mastercard surveyed 7,600 consumers across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany and Spain about their recent financial experiences, young people’s voices came through: They want a more transparent, simpler, digitally-enabled lending process. 

And open banking can make this a reality. Using secure APIs, advanced data analytics, and machine learning, open banking technology allows consumers to safely share their financial data, giving a more up-to-date and holistic view of their ability to repay a loan or afford a line of credit.

Most borrowers are already on board. According to our survey, 77% of those ages 45 to 60 and 68% of those over 60 are willing to grant access to their banking data to secure a credit or loan. Among respondents 18 to 29, the number shoots up to 84%.  

Nearly 60% of younger customers have already linked their accounts while applying for a loan. And, as digital natives, nine out of ten would prefer a loan option with a digital application or approval process.

The consumer base is changing, opening a window for the industry to evolve in step. Today’s borrowers are calling for a new, digital-first era of lending, giving applicants more control over the information used to determine their creditworthiness.  

By allowing consumers to share access to their financial data, open banking can provides a current view of their ability to repay a loan or afford a line of credit for more transparent lending decisions – and a more financially inclusive economy.

Younger borrowers are embracing digital lending

Read more about the future of lending in Mastercard’s Lend Report here. 

How open banking paints a more nuanced picture of borrowers 

Even in the best economic circumstances, loans are often a necessity, especially for critical purchases like homes and cars.  

 For some insight into the lending landscape, Mastercard surveyed 7,600 consumers across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany and Spain about their recent financial experiences.  

The upshot: 89% have been adversely affected by economic pressures, and nearly half are struggling to get the loans and credit they need. 

Traditional credit scores do not always reflect an applicant’s ability to make payments. Individuals with thin or no credit history can struggle to qualify for credit. Young adults on their own for the first time, gig workers who deal mostly in cash, new Americans and retirees with a single credit card and no loans can struggle to qualify for leases, credit cards and mobile phone contracts. 

To most consumers, change is overdue — 87% believe the decisioning process should make it easier for responsible borrowers to prove their ability to repay. 

Open banking could help provide that missing piece. By choosing to share their bank account data, applicants can paint a more complete picture of who they are. Real-time insights into their accounts — such as a thin credit borrower’s biweekly deposits, cash flow or consistent payments for bills like utilities — offer an up to date, more comprehensive view of their financial health. 

This shift in consumer mindset opens new horizons for lenders, allowing them to champion more inclusive processes. 

Open banking has the potential to accommodate millions of thin-credit applicants who have previously had difficulties accessing the benefits of the financial system. Consumers have spoken. They want the next evolution of lending to prioritize transparency, accessibility and empowerment for consumers worldwide to build a more inclusive digital economy where everyone thrives. 

Digital lending is on the rise

The data revealed in Mastercard’s Lend Report shows global consumer support for a more transparent, digital-first approach to lending. Read more about the future of lending in Mastercard’s Lend Report here.

The future of digital finance is evolving, and it’s happening just in time

Over the last few years, the move to digital finance has accelerated. Consumers are adopting emerging financial apps and services, empowering them to take control of their financial health. The same technological leaps that are enhancing payments, financial management and banking are also changing lending for the better, and they couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. 

That’s because consumers are feeling the impact of economic uncertainty and worry about the effect that it may have on them. In a 2023 survey, Mastercard spoke to 7,600 consumers across the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia, France, Germany and Spain about their recent financial experiences. 

 Over 89% of respondents say that they’ve been negatively affected by economic uncertainty. 

At the same time, whether they’re making big purchases like homes or handling everyday needs like transportation or food, consumers worry that they won’t be able to borrow what they need. 

Open banking data can help consumers get to the bottom of these challenges.  

For starters, open banking allows consumers to permission access to their bank account, allowing lenders to augment their credit decisioning models with real time information that gives a better view of the consumer’s ability to repay a loan. That’s important because 95% of those who have been denied a loan in the past two years want more insights into the lending process. People are willing to share secure access to their bank account data, if it means better interest rates, instant approval for a loan, improved chances of being approved for a credit card or to secure an increase in the limit on a credit card.   

Lenders benefit, too. By augmenting traditional credit models with open banking, they can improve operational efficiencies, lower costs and create innovative new lending models that can give consumers the credit they deserve, when they need it.  

The world is going digital

Mastercard provides open banking technology to support leading partners across the ecosystem with safe, flexible and secure lending and payments experiences, partnering with leading players across the ecosystem. Our partnerships with Worldpay from FIS, the merchant solutions business of global financial services technology provider FIS, Zip and J.P. Morgan Payments are driving innovation in billing, lending and payment choice as we scale our global network.

Introducing Normalized Student Loan Data

For fintech innovators, lenders, refinancers, employers and institutions of higher education, working with student loan data has been challenging. Until now, the data hasn’t been normalized. Higher learning institutions have used different naming conventions for data fields, making documentation harder to read, compare or translate. Lenders and servicers have to navigate a forest of screenshots, phone calls with lengthy hold times and unsecure paper documents in their efforts to verify loan information.

These time-consuming manual processes incur labor costs to lenders and servicers. This can cause stress, revenue loss, time loss and negatively impact the lender’s operational efficiency.

Finicity has normalized the data across data fields, vocabulary, naming conventions and applications of rules, resulting in a modernized ecosystem for all stakeholders through its open banking platform. This significantly reduces the time to market for your student loan solutions.

Innovation Platform Using Student Loan Data

Student loan data doesn’t have to be confusing or complicated. With Mastercard Open Banking (some services provided by Finicity, a Mastercard company), an optimized API call can help reduce costs, and is delivered in a formation that doesn’t require additional coding. Our API endpoints can yield the complete loan details, and the full payment details of a student loan account, including up to 24 months of transaction history.

99% Data Coverage

Normalized, comprehensive data covering most student loan accounts. It’s delivered through our open banking platform, with connections to student loan accounts that include federal Direct Loans, FFEL & Perkins, and some of the largest private lenders and servicers (e.g. Aidvantage, Navient, Nelnet, Sallie Mae, Discover, Firstmark, Commonbond, LendKey, etc).

Quality of Data

Extensive Loan Account Details: API calls to the Finicity open banking platform can yield a primary account, transactions by account, loan payment details, statements, account owner and much more. Data is aggregated at the three largest levels of the student loan hierarchy; student loan, student loan group and student loan account, while also being able to provide customer & institution-level details.
Transaction lookback period has been extended to one year in order to accurately capture transaction additions or changes. Up to twenty-four months of transactions can be offered for an extended view of account history.
Complementary data insight solutions with analytics of a borrower’s credits, debits and balances to deliver smarter credit decisioning.
Reliable Uptime Data Monitoring: Multi-tier data integrity and student loan-specific data monitoring.

Create Winning Borrower Experiences

Innovators can quickly develop and scale new and improved financial services with Finicity’s open banking platform. Student loans are the second-largest debt sector in the United States. There is a massive opportunity to develop new apps and services to help individuals with student loan debt. Through partnering with our clients, Finicity’s open banking platform is powering solutions to help over 45 million Americans who carry student loan balances.

Some of the ways innovators can upgrade the borrower experience, using permissioned student loan data:

Create frictionless onboarding and account setup for borrowers to apply for loans, set up accounts, manage repayment and distribute funding to students.
Better data for better credit decisioning. It’s pretty simple. Student loan borrowers want a better experience. Lenders want the most accurate and real-time data for better credit decisioning. So we’ve combined the best data with smart insights to transform the lending experience.
Finicity data powers leading personal finance management (PFM) apps. These tools allow borrowers to view, monitor and manage their debt in near real time by pulling smart, categorized and permissioned loan data into the app. If borrowers can easily understand their financial position and repayment options, they may reduce stress and more effectively manage their debt.
Attracting and retaining the best talent in today’s job market is a challenge for any company. Leveraging permissioned student loan data, some employers are taking advantage of the SECURE 2.0 Act, creating benefits like 401k accounts that match student loan payments and direct matching of student loan payments back to the student loan.
By using the account details endpoint, it’s possible to verify that a student is enrolled in at least half-time coursework by the National Student Loan Data System. Using this data, a rich field of possibility opens up for student-specific benefits. Discounts, rewards and loyalty programs can be built specifically for current students.
Even the more administrative aspects of student loans can be modernized by open banking technology. Student borrowers can be offered the ability to easily and securely apply for federal programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness or an Income-Driven Repayment plan. No wading through W2s, paystubs and long, frustrating calls to student loan servicers. Quick and secure.

Step Into the Future

Break out of the spider web of paper documents, screenshots, phone calls and mismatched data. Replace countless lost hours of productivity with optimized API calls that offer the comprehensive, relevant, normalized data to build solutions on.

Innovate with us to create knowledge-based services that empower students, so they can manage, consolidate, refinance and repay their obligations with the level of transparency that they deserve.

Click here to learn more about our Student Loan Data. If you are ready to see this data in action, click here to request a demo.

A rapidly changing digital landscape

While speed and convenience are crucial in today’s financial innovations, they have to be paired with security. As financial apps and services become more digital, so do the fraudsters who are hard at work trying to pose as legitimate consumers. The spike in identity fraud has become an expensive problem, costing consumers, merchants and financial institutions billions of dollars. In 2021, nearly 42 million Americans fell victim to identity fraud. In that one year, fraudsters made off with some $52 billion through identity scams.

As the exponential growth of digital banking and services has moved more transactions online, fraudsters’ methods have evolved to take advantage. A recent report published by Aite Novarica, Key Trends Driving Fraud Transformation in 2021 and Beyond, showed that 64% of financial institutions were experiencing higher rates of account takeover (ATO) fraud since the onset of the COVID pandemic. According to a 2021 survey of 110 fraud and loss prevention decision makers at fintech firms, 46% of fintechs report that ATO is their most prevalent problem.

Fraud risk can increase when consumers are opening accounts and documenting identities digitally. According to research from Aite-Novarica, almost a quarter of checking account applications filed online in the first three quarters of 2022 were fraudulent, as were nearly one in five online credit card applications.

Open banking and identity networks work in unison to cut down on fraud

In response, financial service innovators are loading up on new tools capable of spotting and preventing fraud in real time, like the integration of identity and open banking solutions. Mastercard Open Banking allows consumers to safely share their financial data to verify account ownership and facilitate transactions, and now we have integrated open banking with our identity network to make sure participants in transactions are who they say they are.

Mastercard can deliver instant identity verification, spotting compromised identities that manual verification may miss. Mastercard’s Identity and Open Banking networks deliver deep insights into the customer’s identity by analyzing relationships between and among the individual pieces of account owner data. For instance, identity network analysis keeps track of how often a name is linked to a phone number or email address.

Open banking also helps providers create low-friction customer experiences. The technology enables them to:

Reduce manual paperwork
Shorten turnaround times
Grant instant access to new accounts

Innovations to secure the future of financial services

For all the promise that the emerging world of consumer-permissioned data holds, none of it will work without trust. Consumers must know that their money and data are safe. Consumers, banks and fintechs must trust that the system is secure and reliable enough to warrant continued investment and innovation.

Open Banking for Account Opening provides a solution from Mastercard to specifically create and protect the ecosystem and minimize identity fraud. By doing so, we’re setting the trusted foundation needed to help our partners create financial services that deliver speed, convenience and security for today’s digital commerce.

Download our e-book Open Banking Data + Digital Identity: Stronger Together in the Fight Against Fraud to learn more about the trends and solutions in combating fraud.

Digital payments are everywhere.

Whether we realize it or not, most of us have incorporated technology into our financial lives. According to the Mastercard New Payments Index, which surveyed 35,040 general consumers across 40 markets, 85% of people globally have used at least one emerging payment method in the last year.

Part of the appeal is choice and simplicity. Consumers can buy a new refrigerator with a credit card, digital wallet or using an automatic buy-now-pay-later program. And they can perform most of their financial transactions from anywhere within a few minutes.

Yet enabling consumers to bank and pay with ease is anything but simple. Banks and fintechs must carefully conceive and build payment technology stacks that are agile, user friendly and integrated with their organizations’ complex infrastructures.

Platforms like i2c can help. A global banking and payment processing platform, i2c provides financial institutions and fintechs with “building block” technology to create their own unique consumer and commercial solutions. As a partner, the company relies on Mastercard Open Banking’s consumer-permissioned data to get the right information into the right hands, safely and quickly.

In a recent conversation at the Tech Innovation Roundtable in New York, Jess Turner, EVP, Global Open Banking and API and i2c CEO Amir Wain sat down with moderator Sherri Haymond, Head of Global Digital Partnerships, to explain how their collaboration works and why it matters:

What are the key market drivers that are leading to unprecedented demand for digital payments?

Jess Turner: The pandemic changed the way people interact with services and products, as well as the way they interact with each other. That change accelerated digitization faster than we expected, providing an opportunity for innovation. People expect more from their digital payment experience. And because of that, everything we do at Mastercard —whether it’s direct-to-consumer or business-to-business products—must have a best-in-class user experience.

Jess Turner and Amir Wain in conversation at the Tech Innovation Roundtable, Master Tech Center, New York

How does the partnership between i2c and Mastercard help deliver a best-in-class experience to fintech innovators?

Amir Wain: A significant component to the digital payment experience rests in the hands of banks and fintechs. These financial institutions provide consumers with the ability to bank, borrow and buy what they need. To make those services work seamlessly, a lot of connectivity needs to happen between Mastercard and service providers like i2c. Through our platform, banks and fintechs can access Mastercard capabilities —such as digitization, open banking and APIs—to extend those services to their end users.

How does open banking strengthen i2c’s platform offerings?

Amir: The basic tenets of payments—convenience, security and ubiquity—haven’t changed. Now open banking offers the right tools to keep us up to date with the new underlying digital technology, not to mention the consumer’s desire to interact with their finances differently. Through i2c, our clients can use open banking to help sign on new customers. Like mortgages, opening a bank account has largely been a manual process, one that required a lot of paperwork for banks and customers alike. But with open banking, customers can give permission to share their data digitally.

Jess, can you share other use cases in which open banking creates opportunities?

Jess: In addition to digital payments, another powerful example is that people can use open banking to get a loan for the first time in their lives. These are people who have been credit invisible or considered thin credit, perhaps because they have a low income, or they lack a credit history. Now they can share open banking data –such as bank transactions or rent payments— to prove they are creditworthy. And that could help a consumer qualify for a loan or empower a budding entrepreneur to kickstart their idea or a small business owner to invest in its growth.

Open banking is also precise. At Mastercard Open Banking, we are working with permissioned data that we then must clean and categorize to verify things. So, if someone says they make $12.9 million dollars every year, we can check that quickly and accurately.

What are you seeing in the landscape of digital payments that you are most excited about?

Amir: I look forward to seeing consumers benefit from even more payment choice. Different people need different kinds of products that are relevant to them. Cookie cutter products are a thing of the past. Expanding what you know about the totality of a customer through tools like open banking and AI enables the development of more personalized products.

At i2c, we work with partners like Mastercard to enhance our building block technology that helps banks and fintechs offer differentiated products and elevated customer experiences.

Jess: I agree with Amir. Right now, these building blocks are critical for innovation because the world is becoming borderless. I am looking forward to seeing how our partnership with i2c will make real innovation happen at scale.

Move money with confidence. Our instant account owner and balance verification enables accurate, confident payments. Learn more here.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–FundingShield, a market-leading, cloud-based firm providing fintech solutions to manage risk, compliance and fraud prevention, has entered a partnership with Mastercard to leverage its open banking platform delivered by Finicity, a Mastercard company. FundingShield provides live, source data-based technology products and SaaS solutions that have been used to secure the funds of over $2.5 trillion in mortgage closings.

FundingShield CEO Ike Suri shared, “FundingShield has over 95% coverage of licensed service providers in the real estate, mortgage, closing and settlement space in our live repository. This partnership with Mastercard allows us to leverage its open banking connectivity of over 95% of U.S. based deposit accounts for consumer-permissioned access to real-time, bank-sourced data to expand our B2B and B2B2C payment verification solutions for clients.“

This partnership expands FundingShield’s offering within the real estate, mortgage and title sector with solutions that protect buyers, sellers, brokers, bank and non-bank lenders, warehouse lenders, and title and settlement entities. More broadly, the firm’s solutions provide risk management surrounding payments to vendors, suppliers, and other outgoing fund recipients in markets where cybersecurity experts estimate cybercrime costs to reach over $10 trillion annually by 2025.

Learn more about this partnership here.