Mastercard taken by Token’s charms for open banking hub
Mastercard has turned to California-based Token to power the connectivity layer of its new open banking hub.
The hub will connect merchants, retailers and other regulated third parties to financial institutions in Europe for data and payment transactions.
Open banking has the “potential to revolutionise how we all interact with financial services”
Further to the announcement in June 2018, Mastercard’s services will include a pan-European directory to help financial institutions ensure that third party providers (TPPs) seeking access to a customer’s account are legitimate and hold the appropriate regulatory status. There is also a dispute resolution mechanism and a connectivity hub.
Jim Wadsworth, senior vice-president, and leading the development of Mastercard’s open banking offering, says open banking has the “potential to revolutionise how we all interact with financial services” and “Token’s work in this space will help us to deliver the vision we’ve set”.
Token will deliver connectivity between third parties’ and financial institutions’ APIs using its operating system, TokenOSTM.
Tokeno is authorised as an account information service provider (AISP) and as a payment initiation service provider (PISP) by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK.
Last year it said it “made history by becoming the first and only PISP to successfully conclude testing with the CMA9, and has since completed integration into all of the UK open banking APIs for both data and payment initiation”.
The CMA9 comprises AIB Group (UK) trading as First Trust Bank in Northern Ireland, Bank of Ireland (UK), Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide Building Society, Northern Bank trading as Danske Bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and Santander.
In Mastercard-related news, its bidding war with Visa recently intensified as the latter put in a £247 million offer for cross-border payments firm Earthport.
