Mastercard Launches Open Banking Partnership With Unzer

Payment/software solutions provider Unzer has formed an open banking-focused collaboration with Mastercard.

The collaboration, announced Monday (Nov. 25), makes Mastercard Unzer’s open banking partner in Germany, Austria and Denmark to enhance open banking account-based payments to power eCommerce payments across Unzer’s payment gateways.

“Through this partnership, Unzer and Mastercard aim to create a unified digital payment ecosystem by leveraging Mastercard Open Banking-driven solutions enabling access to pay by bank,” the companies said in a news release.

“These innovations will offer consumers more secure and seamless payment options, providing greater flexibility when making online purchases.”

Compared to traditional payment methods, the release noted, open banking lets any bank account holder make quick digital payments straight to a merchant. These transactions are initiated through existing bank authentication processes such as biometric verification, allowing for a straightforward and efficient payment process, the release added.

“At Unzer, we are committed to delivering the most integrated payment solutions, and our collaboration with Mastercard allows us to elevate that offering,” said Pascal Beij, chief commercial officer at Unzer. “By tapping into Mastercard’s trusted open banking infrastructure, we can drive innovation and empower merchants with faster, more convenient payment experiences that meet the needs of today’s digital economy.”

The partnership comes at a time when pay-by-bank offerings — while relatively new — are creating buzz in the business world, as PYMNTS wrote last month.

“Executives see it as a potentially cost-effective payment method and recognize its benefits, such as improved data protection,” that report said. “However, concerns about implementation costs remain one factor limiting adoption.”

Over the long term, PYMNTS wrote, pay-by-bank adoption could cost less than staying on top of current payment methods. And this could have an impact. Some surveyed businesses report their current payment methods eat up more than a tenth of their revenues.

And research from PYMNTS Intelligence finds that businesses could employ pay by bank and offer consumers discounts or other incentives and still pay less than their current methods.

“For example, 95% of companies surveyed said they would incentivize adoption of the method,” PYMNTS wrote. “However, some businesses are hesitant about offering the size of discounts that consumers might need to change their payment habits.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke earlier this month with Trustly CEO Alexandre Gonthier, who said some of the consumer hesitation towards adopting pay by bank could be an issue of nomenclature, confusion between open banking payments, pay by bank or account-to-account (A2A) payments.

“It can be confusing because the term pay by bank could technically mean any of the aforementioned payment schemes,” Gonthier said. “But most people today say, ‘pay by bank’ and mean ‘open banking payments.’”