Finicity is part of the Mastercard family. Our open banking platform provides the financial data you need.

By Jess Turner, Executive Vice President of Global Open Banking and API at Mastercard 

So much has changed over the last 20 years in payments that it’s hard to imagine the way the world used to be. A world where booking a trip or shopping for everyday needs required visiting a local travel agent or a grocery store in person, using paper currency for every transaction.  

Today, we’ve become used to an ever-expanding menu of payment choices. Different circumstances call for different types of payments — the convenience of cards for everyday purchases and extended payment terms; bill pay and account-to-account for recurring payments; installments plans for larger purchases spread over a few months. All of these options have emerged as money has become an increasingly digital or data-driven experience, and they are only expected to become more popular in the coming years. According to the results of Mastercard’s 2022 New Payment Index Report, 85% of consumers made at least one digital payment in the past year and 93% expect to in the next 12 months. Consumers are also increasingly adopting alternatives such as digital wallets (35%), digital credit or debit cards (32%) and digital money transfer apps (31%).  

We all saw the impacts of COVID when we needed to be socially distanced. Electronic payments played a key role in keeping life and the economy running. Now, those digital experiences are supercharging other activities. Open banking lets people and businesses safely share their financial data with forward-thinking organizations in order to access new and improved financial experiences like digital payments. 

Going forward, consumers will likely have access to even more sophisticated payment solutions. Mastercard’s 2022 Index Report also showed that: 

The financial data that’s now delivered from open banking was historically available to the consumers themselves – on a computer screen or a paper statement – but traditionally has been cumbersome and complex to use. Yet, with open banking, consumers can now take advantage of new services that make their daily lives easier and with higher levels of safety by opting to share their data with a host of financial institutions and third parties, ranging from billers, merchants, fintechs and digital platforms. 

Open banking can help build an economy that works for everyone. Data is at the heart of every financial experience, from lending to money management to payments and beyond. It can also help the under-banked or those with thin or no credit files by providing easier access to financial data.  

The world is still in the early days of open banking. As an industry, we’re connecting to additional financial data types (sometimes referred to as Open Finance) such as investments, retirement, payroll, and utilities. Financial institutions and fintechs are continuing to innovate financial experiences. In the ecosystem of payments, we’re dramatically expanding choices for consumers and businesses to pay or get paid how, where and when they want.   

As an industry, we’re increasing payment choice, but we’re also optimizing these experiences. Our Smart Payment Decisioning Tools integrate consumer-permissioned data in the account-to-account payment experience, providing billers with indicators of payment success likelihood. Then enhancing payment processing options based on factors like speed and confidence. We are working with our partners to modernizing account-based payments to provide the best outcome for consumers, banks and merchants. It can ensure a higher level of completed payments, supporting stronger impact for consumers and operational efficiencies for banks. Some of these data services are delivered through Finicity, a Mastercard company. 

As open banking-enabled financial services proliferate and their use impacts our daily lives, we as consumers and businesses will expect the same security, protections, and confidence we’ve come to expect of our other financial experiences. We will also see that our ability to control and safely share our data using bank accounts, Pay-by-Bank, blockchain, cards and digital wallets will be transformational to our money experience – making it easier to understand our financial fitness and gain the insights needed to make the best financial decisions. 

To deliver on its promise, open banking requires the most advanced principles and technology in data privacy and security — to provide an easy and effective way to verify account ownership and identity. The open banking ecosystem is rapidly expanding, ushering in the next wave of systems that scale. Players with deep expertise are injecting further trust for even greater adoption. Early results indicate that we’ve got a bright future ahead – more choice in lending and payment types, more control over our financial data and more insights to help us achieve our financial goals.  Learn more about our Mastercard Open Banking solutions for payments and account opening.

Choosing messaging apps over landlines and electric scooters instead of gas-guzzling cars, tech-savvy Gen Zers and Millennials think and experience life very differently to Gen X and Baby Boomers.   

Although their priorities on money differ, there’s one common thread that pulls the generations together: each wants to be in a healthy financial position to enjoy the lifestyle they want both now and in the future.  

Like generations before them, to reach their goals, digital native Millennials and Gen Zers are fast turning to budgeting apps such as Quicken Inc’s Simplifi which helps people stay on top of all their finances in under five minutes a week.   

Driven by consumer-permissioned data from sources including Mastercard’s open banking platform, Simplifi pulls together a wealth of data ranging from checking, savings, stock portfolios and retirement accounts in addition to the other account types that Simplifi integrates into a single, easily customizable dashboard.   

“Putting an emphasis on how we categorize data helps to optimize time spent by customers on tracking their finances,” said Kristen Dillard, Quicken’s vice president of product management. “Now users can see their investment balances, account types and holdings in real time, while personalizing the look, feel and function of the app.”   

It’s a one-stop shop that gives users a big picture view of their finances and lets them choose how they track their money, set spending plans, pay bills, and channel money into rainy-day funds.   

“People are looking to do the same basic thing across generations. They worry: ‘How do I balance my bills with the fact I need to save for retirement, or how do I make sure I spend my money on things that really matter to me, or how do I make sure that inflation isn’t getting the best of my finances,” says Dillard.   

To tune into its mobile-first Millennial and Gen Z users, Quicken looked to the fitness and gaming industries for inspiration on how to help Simplifi customers personalize their experiences.   

Younger users want ease and flexibility when it comes to budgeting. Some might like to track every dollar, similar to tracking every carb and calorie, while others might just want a view of how much cash they can spend on entertainment or travel. Simplifi lets each user decide exactly how they want to slice and dice their spending and savings each month, while push notifications warn if they max out their set budgets.    

For generations who have grown up gaming, receiving rewards for paying bills on time and reaching net worth goals makes the process fun, encouraging them to stick to their financial health plans. 

“Everybody’s approach to personal finances is unique. You have to allow customers to see that data and manage that data in a way they want,” says Dillard.   

“Younger generations expect everything to be in an app. They’re mobile first, they expect to do everything on the go, and they expect efficiency and ease.”  

With Millennials and Gen Zers less likely to take lifelong jobs with plump pension plans, Simplifi helps prepare for the future by pulling in wealth data that let users easily track multiple retirement accounts.   

There’s definitely a different mindset between younger and older generations. In 30 years, will we see the same trend we’ve seen with older customers where they end up in a better financial place? Adopting the right financial tools can be the first step to achieving those goals.  

If you are interested in learning more about Quicken, you can do so here. Click here to learn more about Simplifi by Quicken.  

The promise of digital finance and banking is coming true, moving consumers away from paper statements, branches and phone calls and into quick, intuitive fintech apps and services at a rapid pace. Nine in 10 U.S. consumers are using fintech to handle the simple tasks, and there’s a rising appetite for more complex needs like financial forecasting, investing via cryptocurrency and crowdfunding.  

Every year that goes by, the pace of technological development just continues to increase, offering more and more options for people to track, manage and allocate their money. To create winning financial experiences, access to smart wealth data through a single API call can accelerate innovation, powering visionary apps and services. 

U.S. workers move between jobs every 4.1 years on average, opening and managing various financial and investment accounts as their careers develop, each requiring different credentials to access. Put simply, people have their money stored all over the place, and there’s an opportunity to bring it all together in one dashboard that simplifies consumers’ financial lives and saves them precious time.  

With the advent of open banking data and embedded finance, fintechs and financial institutions can offer a growing menu of innovative investment products and experiences.

The fast track to smart, accurate investment data

Capture and consolidate all the various investment accounts, positions and transactions from a consumers’ portfolio in real time with one API call. Mastercard’s maximum connection reliability and high-quality data and support capabilities cover 95% of deposit accounts. 

One API call returns smart, normalized data across all account types, ready for innovation. Account balance, the type of account, available cash balance, position-level data and cost basis are just a few of the 40 different data elements available in each call. Connect only the fields that you need. This approach makes it simpler to develop insights for consumers, like showing them where they’re overweight or helping them improve their asset allocation and uncovering financial opportunities.  

 

With the speed and ease of fintech app adoption in the digital era, consumers can build up a wide variety of open accounts across institutions and platforms. Mastercard’s wealth data provided via its open banking platform gives innovators the ability to consolidate, or simply gives consumers the ability to see all their accounts in one place.  

Create financial experiences that are quick, comprehensive and easy to use. One API call for innovators, one dashboard for consumers. Build an app or service that eliminates the need to handle a jumble of different credentials for account sites and apps.  

Bringing next-gen ideas to life

The data is the medium to realize your vision. Whether that’s a dynamic dashboard, account consolidation, investment insights or another creative solution, a trusted data partner is vital.  

See how Quicken brought this to life with a new Personal Financial Management tool called Simplifi, targeted at helping Millennials and Gen Z manage their finances. Or talk directly with a Mastercard Open Banking representative about your ideas on delivering new financial insights for your customers. Request a demo.

GIACT, an LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) business, today announces a partnership with Mastercard to leverage its open banking capabilities to provide a secure account verification solution for customers.

The partnership will build on LSEG’s existing suite of digital identity and fraud solutions, allowing businesses to use a multi-method approach to verify account information for over 95%* of U.S. deposit accounts.

This single uniform platform solution authenticates account ownership and enables financial institutions to expand and modernize their account verification capabilities while reducing the risk of fraud.

With Mastercard’s open banking technology, GIACT will be able to deploy Nacha-compliant account verification solutions across its growing array of Customer and Third-Party Risk businesses.  GIACT customers will have access to consumer-permissioned data to verify bank account owner, income account balance and transaction information. By allowing customers to verify a vast array of information within a single bank account, institutions can fulfill customers’ needs more quickly and reliably – streamlining onboarding, decreasing fraud exposure, and supporting compliance.

Read more about Mastercard, GIACT and this partnership here.

*Coverage of US deposit accounts through Mastercard open banking network, bank consortium data sources

Today, Mastercard is announcing that it has added advanced analytics to its Open Banking platform delivered by its subsidiary, Finicity in the U.S. These analytics can help lenders manage their risk profiles while also adding diverse and inclusive credit models for small business loans as well as ongoing monitoring and expansion of credit card lines.

“Small businesses are increasingly looking for greater choice in how they borrow, pay and manage their finances,” said Jess Turner, Mastercard’s Executive Vice President for Global Open Banking and API. “Open Banking provides lenders the owner-permissioned data and advanced analytics they need to offer more choice in financial services to small businesses, which are the backbone of the American economy.”

Read more about Open Banking for Business and how we’re innovating with our partners here.

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.

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.