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.
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.
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.
Mastercard today 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 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.”
Find out more about the initial partners and open banking solutions in the Engage program here.
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.
Synctera, a leading FinTech banking provider helping innovators build their own FinTechs more efficiently, is expanding its partnership with Mastercard by integrating Mastercard’s open banking platform (provided by Mastercard’s wholly owned subsidiary, Finicity) to provide account verification solutions for Synctera-powered FinTechs. The addition of consumer-permissioned data from an open banking platform allows early-stage FinTechs access to the data they need to mitigate fraud, maximize confidence, and provide more choice in payment transactions to improve user experiences.
“Mastercard’s open banking platform provides consumer-permissioned data that is critical to enabling all ecosystem players, opening the door for the future of financial experiences, and can help streamline account verification to reduce friction between apps and consumers,” said Andy Sheehan, Executive Vice President, U.S. Open Banking at Mastercard. “Mastercard and Synctera’s partnership enhances the support and collaboration that is critical to FinTech innovators and will allow entrepreneurs and developers the ability to go to market quickly and ultimately deliver more consumer choice.”
Read more here.