SAP Fioneer and Mastercard Partner on Embedded Payments and Lending

SAP Fioneer, a global provider of financial services software solutions and platforms, has partnered with Mastercard to enhance its embedded financial services.

The collaboration aims to enable SAP Fioneer’s financial services customers worldwide to deliver embedded payments and lending as part of their business and commercial banking proposition, the companies said in a Thursday (Sept. 7) press release.

The current landscape of commercial payments is fragmented, with disconnected systems and processes creating barriers between the purchasing of goods and services and the financial services that underpin business-to-business transactions, according to the release.

In response to this challenge, SAP Fioneer and Mastercard are joining forces to explore opportunities that help banks and FinTechs deliver an embedded payment and lending experience for their customers, meeting the increasing demand for convenience, speed to market and agility, the release said.

“We are delighted to partner with Mastercard to jointly address a burning need for a better, more streamlined approach to embedding financial services into payment processes,” Dirk Kruse, CEO of SAP Fioneer, said.

By integrating Mastercard’s suite of commercial payment and open banking capabilities into SAP Fioneer’s Card Management, Embedded Finance, and SME Lending platforms, banks can accelerate their ability to support evolving client needs for B2B payments, as well as lending and financing for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and consumers, according to the press release.

“For too long, fragmentation has posed a barrier to international trade and commerce,” Rebecca Meeker, senior vice president of global B2B partnerships at Mastercard, said in the release. “By embedding secure payment and lending capabilities into the platforms where commercial activity takes place, with partners like SAP Fioneer, Mastercard is advancing a consumer-grade experience for B2B payments and transforming how companies pay and get paid.”

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that about one-third of financial institutions said that a willingness to partner with FinTechs toward payments digitization is helpful to the adoption of new digital solutions that address B2B payments frictions.

Fourteen percent of financial institutions said this willingness is the most helpful characteristic, and another 18% said it is helpful but not ranked as first, according to “The Innovation Gap: Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Payments Modernization,” a PYMNTS and FIS collaboration.