Open banking empowers consumers to access, use and benefit from their financial data, and to initiate payments between any of their bank accounts. With explicit consent from Secure Trust Bank customers, Mastercard’s open banking technology enables seamless and fast account-to-account payments. This gives customers a new and convenient way to make payments on retail finance loans with Secure Trust Bank’s ‘Easy Bank Transfer’ payment option.

Jim Wadsworth, Senior Vice President, Open Banking, Mastercard said: “At Mastercard, we’re passionate about building technology advancements that enable greater choice and convenience in how consumers pay, access, and manage their finances with open banking. This partnership provides customers with the choice to pay back their retail finance directly from any of their chosen bank accounts safely, quickly, and with the least amount of friction.”

Secure Trust Bank, an award-winning UK retail bank headquartered in Solihull, provides savings accounts and lending services to over 1 million customers. The consumer finance division offers point-of-purchase finance through its V12 Retail Finance business, in partnership with national brands like Watches of Switzerland, Beaverbrooks, DFS and Sofology, to help customers fulfill their ambitions to buy what they want, when they want.

Chris Higham, Head of Payments and Cards at Secure Trust Bank, says: “Our vision is to become the UK’s most trusted specialist lender and partnering with a trusted name like Mastercard helps us to innovate safely for our customers. And it was important for us to choose a partner who had already implemented open banking in the UK with successful financial services use cases.”

Chris continues to explain the impact of the partnership so far, “With Mastercard’s open banking platform, we’re now able to offer our customers more choice when making retail finance repayments. Before, customers wanting to send a payment to their account had to log into their online bank and set up a new payee before they could make a payment, noting the reference number and manually typing it in - which was a slow process for them and resulted in some reconciliation errors for us.”

Mastercard has a strong track record of leading successful open banking collaborations with European financial institutions, powering more than 50 banks across Europe today including Tesco, Lloyds, Danske Bank, DNB, Santander Consumer Bank, and Lunar. In Europe, Mastercard now enables open banking access across 18 markets - empowering banks, payment service providers and fintechs to offer their customers innovative data and payment services that make life easier.

Chris Higham concludes, “This is just the start of our journey with open banking, and we’re aiming to expand our partnership with Mastercard across new areas of the business in the near future.”