For the first time, Mastercard and the FINKit founding partners have agreed to make their capabilities and services available together on the bank-grade, cloud-based FINKit platform, in order to accelerate industry-wide collaboration and the co-creation and launch of exciting new digital customer propositions in banking and payments.

FINKit is a financial services sector-specific cloud-based platform and toolkit that frees banks from the constraints of their existing systems and enables them to continuously deliver innovation into production and into consumers’ hands.

In a rapidly-expanding and increasingly disrupted market, collaboration is essential. FINKit sets the standard, enabling this collaboration while at the same time ensuring bank-grade security, performance, and compliance.

Mastercard is the first global payments technology company to join the FINKit Partner Programme. Explaining its involvement, Mark Barnett, President, Mastercard UK & Ireland, said: “FINKit is a fantastic platform for banks and partners to come together in a live production environment to deliver innovative services securely, reliably, and quickly. We are committed to working with Monitise to enable banks to deliver broad-ranging services such as tokenisation, payment security, location-based services, Masterpass digital wallet solutions, and more. Collaborations of this kind are critical for banks to get the most out of technology and deliver world-class customer service.”

The new and fast-growing FinTech companies joining the FINKit Partner Programme benefit from increased exposure to large potential customers that might otherwise have been inaccessible to them. They also benefit from Monitise’s decade of experience navigating the complex structural, technical, and regulatory environment of financial services. They can develop new products in the knowledge that the banks and financial services companies involved in FINKit are committed to putting innovation in customers’ hands.

Nick Cheetham, Managing Director, Monitise FINKit, says: “We are delighted to welcome Mastercard as one of the founding partners of FINKit. It’s a real vote of confidence in the value of FINKit. It’s vital to simplify collaboration between banks and the wider industry and to get innovative new products and services into customers’ hands delivering benefits quickly, rather than letting them stagnate in banks’ ‘innovation theatres’.

“Early response from current and potential retail banking clients suggests we have a founding group that will enable significant progress to be made in digital service delivery.”