Mastercard Engage Partner program expands to include Open Banking

Mastercard has expanded its ‘Engage Partner’ program to include Open Banking, with Dwolla, Link Financial Technology and Nova Credit among the initial partners to join.

The payment and lending ecosystem providers that sign up to the program will partner with Mastercard Open Banking to offer services to their clients, such as the ability to build and deploy Open Banking solutions for payments and lending decisioning at scale.

Dwolla, FinTech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technology, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio are the initial partners to join the Mastercard Engage program for Open Banking, with additional partners due to be announced over the next few months.

The expansion of the program also provides two new direct implementation options for partners, called ‘Partner Linked’ and ‘Partner Direct’.

According to Mastercard, both methods provide a “seamless and secure” implementation of consumer-permissioned data through its Open Banking services and can be used together or separately, depending on the preference of the financial technology provider.

“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.

Nearly 150 partners have joined the Mastercard Engage program since 2018, helping the company’s customers deploy new solutions on more than 250 million accounts with Mastercard digital services, including all-digital consumer payments experiences, tokenization, digital wallet and mobile POS solutions.

Chris Hansen, head of channels and alliances at Nova Credit, said: “Open Banking has tremendous potential to better empower consumers underserved by the traditional credit system.

“This partnership enables lenders to seamlessly access new risk insights for more predictive underwriting, while providing consumers more control and transparency to manage their financial lives.”

Peter Hazlehurst, co-founder and CEO of Synctera, added: “Expanding Mastercard’s Engage program is a catalyst for better fintech creation and adoption that will help people get better access to better financial services. We’re proud to work alongside Mastercard to change the way America banks, invests, and spends money.”

Last month, Mastercard launched a new payments feature, ‘Pay by Link’, led by its European Open Banking platform Aiia, which is designed to allow businesses to accept and receive payments anywhere.