Mastercard announces partnerships with Currensea and Secure Trust Bank

Recently, Mastercard posted an announcement of two new partnerships with a fintech firm Currensea, and Secure Trust Bank. According to reports, the move will have a great effect on the open banking applicability in the UK, and it will actually set a new direction for the UK open banking sector.

In its recent text titled Bon Voyage To Foreign Exchange Fees, Mastercard explained that open banking allows consumers to proactively and securely share their banking data with firms like Currensea to enable innovative financial services. The move forms a promising next step for open banking in the country while also helping to define the future of finance.

Mastercard recently also launched an automated clearing house payment initiative known as Pay-by-Bank, in collaboration with J.P. Morgan Payments. In other words, the company has been transforming the financial industry for a while now, and it just took a pivotal role within UK’s open banking.

Mastercard and Currensea

Currensea primarily acts as a debit-as-a-service platform, and it has teamed up with Mastercard’s startup engagement open banking program known as Start Path. Start Path is a new program introduced in June of this year, featuring a number of resources for start-ups that are in need of help. With these resources, they can scale and develop open banking products of their own. The program also aims to encourage co-innovation and point out the benefits of collaboration of forward-thinking entities in the financial industry.

Apart from that, the program also offers other types of support for fintech, including market expansion, customer acquisition product marketing, product development, and more. Currensea’s CEO, James Lynn, said that the program will transform the company’s business, and it will provide the tools necessary to scale at pace and partner with other organizations to allow them to issue their own branded debit cards.

Mastercard and Secure Trust Bank

On the other hand, there is Mastercard’s new partnership with Secure Trust Bank — its second major partnership recently. This is a bank located in Solihull, and it joined up with Mastercard to work on developing retail finance repayment solutions.

According to Mastercard’s SVP of open banking, Jim Wadsworth, the new partnership will allow customers to pay back their retail finance directly in different ways, using their chosen bank accounts. Essentially, this is a solution that materialized in the bank’s payment option called Easy Bank Transfer. The feature cultivates wider customer convenience in regard to retail finance repayments. Of course, it also belongs to open banking and its application of financial data.

The bank’s official, Chris Higham, who acts as the head of payments and cards, stated that it was important to select a partner that had managed to implement open banking in the UK, and to do it successfully. So, Mastercard was an obvious answer. It features its own open banking platform, and that allowed Secure Trust Bank to offer its customers greater choice when making retail finance repayments.