Mastercard has announced an expansion of its Engage partner network to offer access to technology partners that can build and deploy Open Banking solutions for payments and lending services. The initial partners to join the Mastercard Engage programme for Open Banking include Dwolla, FinTech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technology, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio.

Through this new programme, these providers will partner with Mastercard Open Banking to offer services to their clients. Other benefits are fewer contracts, faster access to customers, data security and access, and overall flexibility to better leverage Mastercard’s robust open banking services. Since 2018, nearly 150 partners around the world have joined the Mastercard Engage programme.

In 2021, nearly 100 Engage partners have helped their customers deploy new 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. Benefits of Open Banking services for payments and lending 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.

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. What does Mastercard Engage programme bring to the table The Engage program provides two new direct implementation options for partners — Partner Linked and Partner Direct.

These methods provide a secure implementation of consumer-permissioned data through Mastercard’s open banking services and can be used together or separately, depending on the preference of the financial technology provider. As an Engage technology partner, additional benefits include: Go-to-market collaboration, promotion, training and insights, along with technical support. The programme includes partners that offer various components and integration capabilities across all business verticals, serving banks, merchants, lenders and fintech customers.

Some Mastercard Open Banking platform services are delivered through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Finicity. Open banking services through the Engage is a global program, additional partners across markets will be announced in coming months.