As open finance increasingly became part of our everyday lives in 2025, Mastercard Open Finance’s mission was simple: make it easier for merchant partners to integrate with the platform and for end users to interact with financial institutions and share their data.
Both goals come down to one vital thing—improving the user experience, irrespective of whether the user is a traditional bank, a private or public organization or a consumer. Towards that end, Mastercard Open Finance made several key advances with Mastercard Data Connect.
“With these changes, partners have greater ownership and flexibility within the connect flow while consumers can enjoy more personalized experiences with every interaction, reducing friction for users and increasing conversion rates for partners,” said Mastercard Director of Product Management Wes Shelnutt.
With this directive in mind, Mastercard rolled out a suite of upgrades aimed at making the user experience more customizable and responsive to partner needs. As a result, conversions climbed more than 5% across partners.
These are the innovations that had the most impact on all users:
- Connect Components: Partners can now design, build and maintain much of the customer experience. This allows for a greater level of customization than has previously been available within the industry and –more importantly— keeps the partner’s brand front and center throughout the entire customer experience. Partners also have the ownership to iterate at their own pace and, by eliminating the back and forth with Mastercard, save time during iterations. The result is higher customer conversion rates and cost savings for partners with unparalleled customization of the user experience.
- Returning User Experience (RUX): Nearly one-in-ten open finance users abandon the process during the financial institution search screen, according to Mastercard. RUX tackles this drop-off rate by leveraging a user’s prior selections to build a tailored, streamlined path toward providing access to their data in order to get the services they need. This entails connecting users to the correct financial institutions and allowing U.S. consumers to see which accounts they’ve already linked. The impact was immediate: customer conversion rates jumped 3% with returning users seeing rates increase as much as 13%.
- Customize Connect: Mastercard also fine-tuned its Customize Connect feature based on partner and user feedback. Small but meaningful tweaks—such as enlarging the highlighted screen in the Connect flow for better visibility, especially on laptops—made the platform more intuitive. An added logo editing tool gave partners more control over branding, ensuring every customer touchpoint felt familiar and trustworthy.
- Error Codes: Newly upgraded error codes now show users and partners how to fix broken connections, thereby improving customer experience. Partners receive errors in various categorized buckets, each with actionable solutions.
- FI Search (Fuzzy Matching): We all suffer from fat thumb syndrome from time to time. Now, Mastercard Data Connect’s improved search logic has a better understanding of how we misspell things. It knows, for example, that when we type Wels Fargo it is really Wells Fargo. With the upgrade, Mastercard Data Connect lets you be human and make little mistakes without sacrificing conversion rates and user experience.
In a rapidly evolving open finance ecosystem, users are continuously discovering new ways to use its technology, as well as identifying how the experience can better suit their needs. Mastercard Data Connect positions open finance to deliver on both, keeping clarity and user-centric design at the foundation of every digital interaction.
Learn more about Mastercard Data Connect here
