UpSWOT and Mastercard Partner on Open Banking for Small Businesses

upSWOT and Mastercard have teamed up to help banks offer new services to business clients.

The new partnership adds Mastercard’s open banking capabilities and its subsidiary Finicity’s services to upSWOT’s white-label embedded finance and business management platform, the companies said in a Tuesday (Jan. 17) press release.

“By combining technologies of both companies, we will help banks provide solutions for small businesses to make better decisions and grow their organization, rather than just a safe harbor for storing money or getting loans,” upSWOT CEO Dmitry Norenko said in the release.

PYMNTS research has found that the opportunity for banks to streamline financial services and provide personalized alerts and products to small and midsized business (SMBs) is enormous.

In fact, 41% of SMBs are interested in using banking services from a digital service provider, according to “Digital Banking Rises to Meet SMB Needs,” a PYMNTS and NCR collaboration that is the latest in the “Digital-First Banking Tracker® Series.”

SMBs are clear in their demands for prioritized digital banking relationships, especially those that include embedded finance, as well as convenience and customer analytics and intelligence, the report said.

With the upSWOT platform’s new open banking capabilities, SMBs can connect their financial data to 200 apps enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs), according to the Tuesday press release.

These APIs provide access to accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), payroll, eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, point-of-sale (POS) and other business applications, the release said.

The open banking capabilities also enable financial institutions to gain insights into the needs of their SMB clients and provide relevant financing offers when they are needed.

“Open banking is emerging as a powerful solution to fuel new and improved financial services for small business owners,” Mastercard Executive Vice President of U.S Open Banking Andy Sheehan said in the release. “We are excited to partner with upSWOT to make it easier for financial institutions to offer their small business customers the ability to benefit from their financial data to make decisions, demonstrate their ability to manage a loan and run their businesses more efficiently.”