Mastercard launches new open banking innovation in Europe to accelerate financial inclusion

New account owner verification service automates how businesses verify customer bank account ownership through open banking technology.

Mastercard also seals an agreement with leading European credit scoring fintech Algoan.

Today, Mastercard is announcing its latest open banking innovations in Europe – Account Owner Verification, a new solution that enables a frictionless experience aimed to instantly verify people are who they say they are.

To further fuel the ambitions of Mastercard’s vision in delivering intelligent open banking data services, it is entering a new partnership with France-based open banking credit decisioning specialist, Algoan, which builds upon Mastercard's strength in enabling smarter lending decisions through open banking in the U.S. and accelerates inclusion through advancements in credit decisioning.

These new innovations support Mastercard’s commitment to embrace new networks and expand its open banking capabilities, which allow people to safely share their financial data to access innovative payment experiences – expanding choice, delivering secure and frictionless lending, and bringing the promise of the digital economy to more people.  

Secure digital onboarding
In an increasingly digital world, bank account verification is more important than ever before. The launch of Mastercard’s account owner verification service automates, strengthens, and simplifies how businesses across markets and industries can verify customer bank account ownership.

“With account owner verification, we initiate an important step in Europe towards helping our customers across the ecosystem save time and money through a fast, secure and reliable account verification process. This open banking product innovation gives consumers the power to use their data in new and secure ways to transact through a seamless experience,” says Jess Turner, EVP, Global Open Banking and API.

Mastercard envisions this solution to have wide impact across industries helping to solve pain points in account opening when adding payment credentials and direct debit origination for players such as digital wallets providers, PSPs, wealth management apps, property technology platforms, insurance companies, e-commerce players and more. The solution enables instant verification of bank account ownership based on Mastercard’s European open banking connectivity. The verification process also provides businesses with a match score that denotes the strength of a match between the name submitted for verification and the name held on file by the end user's financial institution.

Partnering with European leader in credit scoring  
In addition to this new product innovation, Mastercard has initiated a new partnership with France-based open banking credit decisioning specialist, Algoan, to help accelerate financial inclusion across new European markets, starting in the Western European region.

“Open banking data is a powerful tool to deliver better, faster, and more inclusive credit decisioning. We continue to focus on increasing our growing list of partners to deliver local market knowledge and feature rich tools that further accelerate Open Banking adoption. We are pleased to announce our strategic partnership with Algoan to support our ambitions across Europe,” says Bart Willaert, EVP Open Banking International Markets at Mastercard.

Algoan offers a full suite of credit decisioning tools using open banking to support leading lenders. As part of the partnership, they will use Mastercard Open Banking connectivity to empower their Credit Insights, Credit Score and Payment Score products, alongside categorization feature.

“Partnering with Mastercard is a great testimony to the journey we’ve been on for the past five years. We’re excited that our ambition of making credit more accessible and more responsible is shared by Mastercard and this truly marks the beginning of a great collaboration which will further accelerate our growth across Europe and beyond,” says Michael Diguet, CEO and Co-Founder of Algoan.