Payments Archives

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.

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.

Jorn Lambert joins Fintech Insider host David M. Brear and guests to ask “How does Big Tech shake up the payments industry?”

David, Jorn and guests discuss how partnerships, acquisitions, processes and public fallouts affect the relationship between financial services and Big Tech, how the relationship has developed, the challenges in that relationship and how the industries cross over and influence each other.

What does the future look like for Big Tech and the payments industry?

To learn more and listen to this podcast episode, click here.

Mastercard’s Serenie Gagon, Vice President, Product, Payment Solutions spoke on the Accelerating Shift to Digital Payments panel at the Smarter Faster Payments 2023 conference in Las Vegas.

Gagon said security and ease are always top of mind in any type of payment, and best practice for account-based payments involves “making sure that the person who is connecting the bank account has the authority on that account.”

“The trick with having security and preventing fraud is you don’t want to introduce so much friction that it’s not worth it for a consumer or user to use that payment method or to use that tool. It’s about letting the good guys through, with less friction, and minimizing the challenges that they face.”
Serenie Gagon, Vice President, Product, Payment Solutions

To access the full session link and find out more, read here.

American Banker makes the case for smarter innovation through collaboration

Mastercard is extending its services and technology reach, including deals with JPMorgan Chase, LSEG/Giact, Stax’s CardX and Jack Henry & Associates, enabling Mastercard partners to connect merchants to payments, improve authentication and streamline transaction processing.

“For the partners, the networks like Mastercard bring their technology and processing capabilities, but I think even more crucially they bring that brand and extremely high levels of trust,” said Gilles Ubaghs, strategic advisor for commercial banking and payments at Aite-Novarica Group.

Mastercard’s multi-rail payments approach gives consumers more choice. Digital first and open banking offer an expansion of that choice, while ensuring transactions are easy and safe.

Read about Mastercard’s innovative partnerships at American Banker.

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:

Nearly 60% of consumers are open to connecting their bank account to other financial services to enable automatic repayments for installment plans.
More than half of consumers have already used a merchant-specific currency, including loyalty points, store credit or “in-game” money.
Younger generations are more likely to explore payments in emerging spaces – 48% of Gen Z and millennials are interested in being able to purchase virtual products in the metaverse.

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.

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.