Mastercard Open Banking expands income verification solution

Mastercard Open Banking has teamed up with payroll data aggregator Argyle to expand its ‘Verification of Income and Employment’ (VOIE) solution to include credentialed payroll.

Through the expanded VOIE solution, consumers can permission access to their payroll account data, mitigating the amount of income documentation they need to collect.

Given that Argyle provides more than 90% coverage of the US workforce, financial institutions are able to digitally verify an applicant’s income and employment in “moments”.

The latest development means that Mastercard Open Banking’s VOIE solution populates consumer-permissioned data directly into the correct fields, thereby creating a smoother loan application process.

“We’re excited to partner with Mastercard Open Banking to make digital verification of income and employment widely available through our trusted network of consumer-permissioned connections,” said Brian Geary, chief operating officer at Argyle.

“Together, we are creating smarter lending experiences, free from time-consuming manual touchpoints while achieving faster and more accurate verification​s.”

Josh Cilman, executive vice president at Intercoastal Mortgage, called Mastercard Open Banking’s new credentialed payroll enhancement “a much more cost-effective way to verify income and employment”.

Mastercard Open Banking, which is provided by Mastercard company Finicity, offers a range of digital income and employment verification solutions, one of which is ‘Deposit Income’ which analyses direct deposit streams from the consumer’s permissioned bank account data to identify an applicant’s income.

In March this year, Fannie Mae made ‘Deposit Income’ available as part of its ‘Desktop Underwriter’ validation service, streamlining the mortgage origination process for lenders and homebuyers.

Earlier this month, Mastercard integrated new account opening and funding solutions enabled by Open Banking, payroll and merchant data connections, in partnership with US-based Atomic.

The new solutions, ‘Deposit Switch’ and ‘Bill Pay Switch’ allow consumers to automatically switch their direct deposits and update their recurring bill payments, when opening a digital account or when updating information on an existing account.