Finicity is part of the Mastercard family. Our open banking platform provides the financial data you need.

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:   

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.

Bonifii today announced that it has selected Mastercard, through its wholly owned subsidiary Finicity, as the preferred open banking provider for its MemberPass® credit unions to access consumer-permissioned bank data, to inform underwriting for different loan types across mortgage, auto, personal and small business.

Mastercard’s open banking platform can deliver verification of income, asset, and employment reports directly to credit unions during the underwriting process, all built with consumer-permissioned data from the borrower. This technology enables credit unions to offer a digital-first method through which their borrowers can instantly provide the required information that the credit union needs to make a lending decision and replaces manual processes historically associated with the underwriting process for both the borrower and the lender.

Read more here.

For innovative financial services apps to work effectively, they need to meet the needs of their customers. One of the core ingredients of next-gen apps is accurate, up-to-the-minute financial data. With this data, apps can transform user financial service experiences, enabling consumers to direct payments and gain insights into savings and spending. Apps can even remove the friction of applying for loans. 

The challenge is coming up with a secure way to enable access to this all-important data.

According to Mastercard’s Rise of Open Banking survey, nine out of 10 consumers already use technology to manage their money. Apps like Experian Boost, which helps consumers improve their credit score, or Quicken, which provides a 360-degree view of finances, save consumers time and add convenience to their lives. Open banking platforms, which allow users to grant third parties access to their banking data, provide the data that makes the functionality of these apps possible.

The backbone of open banking is empowering consumers and small and midsize businesses to securely share data. Legacy technologies have played an important role in this. However, this data sharing experience increasingly is enabled through an API connectivity model that will further increase security and improve data access.

Mastercard has partnered with Fiserv to move this open banking model forward. 

Fiserv enables thousands of banks to easily and readily deploy digital capabilities and services. AllData® Connect from Fiserv enables consumers to grant permission through their bank to share their data with the apps they want to use. 

The bank then issues a token that can be used to authenticate the sharing of the consumer’s financial information with the apps they use through the Mastercard open banking platform. This permission is transparent to the consumer and can be managed and revoked easily. 

With nearly 40% of US banks using Fiserv core technology, the partnership with Mastercard expands consumer access to secure and convenient tokenization capabilities, and is set to fast-forward the growth of new financial experiences through this secure, direct API access. 

Expanding Secure, Tokenized API Access to Upgrade the Open Banking Ecosystem

The partnership between both companies represents a significant leap forward toward the goal of fully tokenized, direct API access and the retirement of legacy technologies. Mastercard, through its Finicity acquisition, has long taken a leadership role in the adoption of API connectivity and has moved the majority of its traffic to these connections. 

“The primary goal of this agreement is to remove the need for consumers to have to share their banking usernames and passwords with third parties in order to access their financial information,” says Paul Diegelman, vice president of Digital Payments and Data Aggregation at Fiserv. “The ability of fintech apps to access information via direct APIs also reduces the need for screen scraping, while improving the consumer’s user experience.”

AllData Connect from Fiserv makes it easy for banks to facilitate data sharing on behalf of their customers. Fiserv manages technology integration for the banks, saving them time and the costs related to implementing and maintaining the technology on their own. AllData Connect also provides banks more insight into the apps their customers are using, to simultaneously protect the data and provide services that create loyal bonds between the customer and the bank.   

“Mastercard has provided credit and debit solutions to the Fiserv ecosystem for years,” says Ryan Christiansen, Mastercard’s senior vice president of data access partnerships. “Now through this agreement, we deepen our relationship by providing trusted data-sharing capabilities that fuel next-gen financial service experiences, such as expanding payment choices, budgeting and lending options to consumers and small businesses through the  financial institutions supported by Fiserv.”

Learn more about Finicity, a Mastercard company’s principles and innovations here.

Finicity, a Mastercard company, and Fiserv, Inc., both leaders in open banking technology, are advancing the future of open finance through secure data sharing. A data access agreement between the companies will allow thousands of Fiserv financial institution clients to enable consumers to provide clear and explicit permission to securely share their account information with apps that use Finicity’s open banking platform.

“This data access agreement complements Mastercard’s longstanding partnership with Fiserv, demonstrated by our aligned missions to empower consumers and organizations to permission the use of their financial data for their benefit,” said Ryan Christiansen, SVP, Data Access Partnerships at Mastercard. “The strong payments connectivity between Mastercard and Fiserv via tokenization, traditional processing and beyond extends across infrastructure, applications and services to the secure and highly reliable API connections we’re enabling through open banking.”

Finicity is a leader in signed data access agreements. Through this partnership with Fiserv, a major core banking solution provider, Mastercard connectivity continues to outpace competitors and further diminishes credential use within the ecosystem.

Read more here.