US-based FinTech Automation has been approved as one of the initial technology integration partners for Open Banking on Mastercard ’s Engage partner network. The partnership has been created to help businesses build, launch, and grow payment solutions.

The Engage program has developed a network to provide businesses access to technology partners that can build and deploy Open Banking solutions for payments and lending decisioning at scale. FinTech Automation (FTA) allows firms to build a digital financial hub with little to no code and, through Open Banking, 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.

How does it work? As FTA points out their solutions are designed with security at the centre and are intended to help meet consumers’ financial needs and allow choice. The companies want to create innovation that will increase financial inclusion and expand access to digital services across the globe. FinTech Automation is a financial technology company dedicated to building a fully digital financial experience with little to no code.

The FTA UniFi Platform is the foundational component, the building blocks used by the company to help their clients innovate and growth their business. The UniFi platform offers banking, payments, compliance, and wealth management Software as-a-Service applications, which are integrated with 40+ partners to offer analytics, databases, Open Banking, tools for application development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation. For FinTech Automation, the inclusion in the Engage partner network translates into fewer contracts, faster customer access, added data security, and heightened overall flexibility in Mastercard’s network.

Mastercard in Colombia Recently, Mastercard was in the eye of Colombia’s Superintendence of Industry and Commerce, as the South American country’s government was concerned about restrictive practices of competition that could be conducted by Mastercard and Visa. According to the complaint filed by one of these local agents, Visa and Mastercard would be carrying out actions to block, eliminate or make the Local Withholding Agent (LCA) model more expensive in several Latin American countries like Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia. Visa and Mastercard would also have offered local banks that the transactions in the LCA system be processed under programs created by the same two companies, which would imply that the additional costs and fees would increase the value of the transactions between seven and ten times the real value.

Considering these actions, it is estimated that it would lead be an increase in fees in LCA model transactions that would range between 700% and 1000%. This would consequently lead to the prices of the goods and services offered by foreign electronic businesses to increase. The businesses that do not adhere to the programs created by the two big franchises would be excluded.

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