Mastercard Introduces Solution to Losses in Business

Emma Okonji

Mastercard has introduced Mastercard Track, in collaboration with Microsoft, to further drive ease of doing business. Track is a unique global trade platform that will simplify and enhance how companies around the world do business with each other.

While parts of the Business to Business (B2B) process have been digitised, large and costly gaps still remain, which is an estimated $500 billion in annual administrative costs and rising. These costs are added to the inefficiency of the nearly half of all global business transactions, totaling $58 trillion that are still done in paper.

Mastercard Track will address these fundamental challenges by further streamlining and automating the procure-to-pay-process, enabling businesses to manage business identity, compliance and payments in a more efficient way.

Vice Chairman and President of Strategic Growth at Mastercard, Michael Froman, said: “While there have been great improvements and innovations in the way consumers pay, the global B2B space remains highly inefficient and paper-based. “This adds hundreds of billions of dollars of costs and burdensome delays to global trade. Mastercard Track is a tool that will help reduce frictions in the global trading system and promote increased exports, especially by small and medium-sized businesses.”

While consumers have become accustomed to a broader choice of technology solutions, businesses too are looking for speed, security and convenience in their everyday operations. From reducing the steps it takes to identify a business partner, to making the payments process simpler and more transparent, Mastercard Track has the potential to unlock economic growth and to level the playing field for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

Executive Vice President, Microsoft, Peggy Johnson, said: “Together with Mastercard, we are helping companies around the world accelerate the pace of their own transformation by creating a more efficient buying and selling process at scale.

“By building Mastercard Track on Azure, Mastercard will be able to take advantage of our stringent security and compliance standards, our global footprint and our intelligent cloud solutions to help organisations of all sizes drive value from the back-office to the front of the enterprise,” he said.

Addressing identity, compliance and payment management needs, Mastercard said in the beginning of early 2019, customers of these organisations will be able to maintain, retrieve and exchange key information relating to themselves and their trading partners through the Track Trade Directory, a secure, permissioned repository of over 150 million company registrations worldwide. This central directory will integrate feeds from more than 4,500 compliance lists into one place, making the screening and onboarding of suppliers more efficient.