Secure Trust Bank teams up with Mastercard for Open Banking payments

UK retail bank Secure Trust Bank has partnered with Mastercard to be able to offer Open Banking-enabled account-to-account payments.  

Through the collaboration, customers can make repayments on retail finance loans with Secure Trust Bank’s ‘Easy Bank Transfer’ payment option, powered by Mastercard’s Open Banking technology. 

The new way of repaying retail finance loans is already available to the bank’s 1.5 million customers in the UK and is being used by 30% of customers as the preferred way to pay through the feature ‘Easy Bank Transfer’. 

Chris Higham, head of payments and cards at Secure Trust Bank, said it was important to choose a partner that “had already implemented Open Banking in the UK with successful financial services use cases”. 

“With Mastercard’s Open Banking platform, we’re now able to offer our customers more choice when making retail finance repayments,” Higham added.  

“Before, customers wanting to send a payment to their account had to log into their online bank and set up a new payee before they could make a payment, noting the reference number and manually typing it in – which was a slow process for them and resulted in some reconciliation errors for us.” 

Secure Trust Bank intends to expand its partnership with Mastercard across new areas of the business. 

Mastercard’s Jim Wadsworth

Jim Wadsworth, SVP, Open Banking at Mastercard, said: “This partnership provides customers with the choice to pay back their retail finance directly from any of their chosen bank accounts safely, quickly, and with the least amount of friction.” 

Mastercard now enables Open Banking access across 18 European markets. 

In November, JP Morgan Payments teamed up with Mastercard to launch a ‘Pay-by-Bank’ service that uses Open Banking to enable consumers’ financial data to be shared between trusted parties to make recurring payments, such as bills and rent, directly from their bank account. 

The companies are piloting Pay-by-Bank with a small number of US-based billers and merchants this year, before expanding the service next year.