In a move to strengthen the
San Francisco-based Token will establish the connectivity layer to the open banking hub, helping Mastercard connect merchants, retailers and other regulated third parties to financial institutions in Europe for data and payment transactions.
In addition to the connectivity, the hub provides a pan-European directory to help financial institutions ensure that third party providers seeking access to a customer's account are legitimate and hold the appropriate regulatory status. It also offers a dedicated transaction dispute resolution mechanism.
“Open banking has the potential to revolutionize how we all interact with financial services,"Jim Wadsworth, senior vice president and head of Mastercard’s open banking service, said in a Wednesday press release.
"Our API-led solutions will make it easier for financial institutions and third parties to act on the opportunities and create innovative banking and payments experiences for people’s everyday lives," Wadsworth added. "Token’s work in this space will help us to deliver the vision we’ve set.”
Token.io is authorized as an Account Information Service Provider and as a Payment Initiation Service Provider by the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. Its service adds more security layers for Mastercard, while allowing banks and other players in the payments ecosystem to build bank-direct payment methods and data aggregation solutions for their customers.
The Token operating service delivers flexible, open APIs and programmable money technology, together with the operational support, consent management, monitoring and reporting required to manage and develop new services.
“Fragmentation and a lack of consistency in third-party access are creating complexity in open banking, so we welcome the chance to work with Mastercard and leverage Token’s open API platform to address these issues at scale and together accelerate the global adoption of open banking,” Token founder and CEO Steve Kirsch said in the release.
