Mastercard Teams With Backbase to Speed Cross-Border Payments

Backbase is integrating Mastercard’s money movement service Mastercard Move into its banking operating system (OS).

This collaboration, announced Monday (June 8), is designed to help financial institutions adopt near real-time cross-border payments.

“The Backbase ecosystem extends the AI-native banking OS with best-of-breed capabilities across payments, fraud management, open banking , dispute management, and end-to-end banking services,” Mayank Somaiya , global vice president and head of ecosystem partnerships at Backbase, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“With Mastercard Move accessible directly through the banking OS, banks can deliver trusted international payments within the same digital journeys their customers already use — competing with digital-first and nontraditional players on experience, pricing, transparency and speed.”

According to the release, the integration is designed to help financial institutions deploy international payment solutions while lessening implementation complexity and time-to-market.

“This integration reduces implementation timelines significantly for joint customers, while enabling complete payment flow management from customer initiation through settlement and reconciliation,” the companies said.

The release added that the partnership will initially focus on banks based in the European Union, Middle East, and North Africa regions who want to improve their cross-border capabilities. The companies note that their collaboration is happening at a time when “digital-first consumers expect near-instant, transparent international transfers.”

The partnership follows a collaboration between Backbase and Plaid announced in February, aimed at addressing what the companies called one of banking’s biggest challenges: data fragmentation that hinders innovation and the customer experience.

“Financial institutions face a common problem: Data lives in silos, legacy integrations break constantly, customer onboarding often takes several days — and lack of visibility across databases means creating personalized experiences is challenging and costly,” the companies said in a news release at the time.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds that adoption of real-time corporate payments has been quite slow, with traditional rails like credit card, checks and ACH transfers continuing to dominate B2B payments .

While 94% of businesses say these methods allow them to pay suppliers on time, percentages begin to shrink when finance leaders are asked about the benefits of these payment systems, according to “Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails. Here’s How They’re Getting There,” conducted in collaboration with The Clearing House .

“By contrast, the report found that businesses using real-time payment rails consistently outperform peers across those same measures tied to cash management, reconciliation and supplier operations,” PYMNTS wrote last week.