Mastercard Start Path welcomes 8 new startups to its New Networks program

From leveraging AI to inform lending decisions to preventing push payment fraud, these fintechs are helping consumers unleash the power of their data for new, improved and innovative payment experiences.  

Today, Mastercard unveils the newest companies accepted into Start Path, its award-winning startup engagement program: Aazzur, Astrada, Carrington Labs, FairPlay, FutureBank, Impactica, Ozone API and Trudenty.

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This cohort joins Start Path’s global portfolio — which is comprised of more than 450 startups from over 60 countries — to participate in a dedicated New Networks program for scaling and powering experiences that enable consumer choice. Each startup was carefully selected during a competitive application and vetting process for its distinguished approach to building solutions utilizing open banking and open finance principles. These companies will explore opportunities with Mastercard to democratize financial services and put people and small businesses at the center of where and how their data is used.   

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Meet the New Networks startups:

“It has always been a dream of mine to build a company and a great team, working in finance, with a bit of a knack for IT — it’s a natural match,” says Philipp Buschmann, CEO of Aazzur. “My vision for the future is ubiquity: embedded finance everywhere, AI everywhere and a whole recontextualization of what the future looks like for business.”

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Astrada helps software companies access and leverage real-time transaction feeds to create user-friendly payment experiences, beginning with spend management.

“As the saying goes, ‘everything is fintech,’ and that sentiment holds true as technology continues to transform the way we manage financial data,” says Salman Syed, CEO of Astrada. “Fintech touches the lives of countless businesses and consumers every day, demonstrating the real-world impact of our efforts. With AI unlocking unprecedented insights, Astrada is helping to remove friction from expense reporting and set a new standard for the industry.”

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Carrington Labs empowers lenders and financial institutions to make informed lending decisions with product-specific credit risk scoring and loan limit recommendations powered by explainable AI.

“My passion for fintech comes from a desire to revolutionize lending with technology that drives fairness and transparency,” says Jamie Twiss, CEO of Carrington Labs. “At Carrington Labs, we harness the power of explainable AI to provide lenders, fintechs and financial institutions with a crystal-clear, full-picture view of a loan applicant’s creditworthiness. Our platform is redefining credit risk scoring to unlock smarter credit decisions and expand access for underserved communities.”

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FairPlay enables companies using AI to make decisions about consumers’ lives to refine their models and fix blind spots, thereby increasing revenue, ensuring compliance and improving outcomes for consumers.

“My vision for the future of financial technology is to build fairness infrastructure for financial services, allowing all financial institutions to de-bias their digital decisions in real time, says Kareem Saleh, CEO of FairPlay.

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FutureBank provides a platform for financial institutions that simplifies the integration between core banking and modern fintech and grows with businesses.

“I found the banking and payments technology landscape unnecessarily complex and noticed how banks and fintechs were tied to core banking systems, keeping them from new product innovations and digital transformation,” says Sergio Barbosa, CEO of FutureBank. “Banking and payments should be 100% plug-and-play, and I see a future where that is possible through FutureBank.”

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Impactica Labs is an open finance solution that helps organizations streamline public benefits enrollment and enhance access to essential services.

We started Impactica to address the challenges low and moderate-income households face when navigating complex benefits systems,” says Kevan de Silva, who co-founded Impactica with Ariel Porath. “Fintech and open banking offer solutions that can transform and simplify access to essential benefits and create pathways to financial stability and opportunity for those who need it most.”

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Ozone API helps banks and financial institutions around the world deliver high-performing, standards-compliant open banking APIs.

“We know open finance has the power to change the world — it will lay the foundations to drive economic growth, accelerate innovation and tackle societal challenges like financial inclusion,” says Huw Davies, CEO of Ozone API. “To help unlock that potential, we remove the complexity for banks, providing them with the tools to deliver high-performing APIs that fuels real progress.”

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Trudenty’s Consumer Trust Network enables merchants, issuers and acquirers to collaborate through privacy-preserving data sharing to prevent first party and Authorized Push Payment fraud.

“I’ve experienced fraud both as a merchant battling first-party fraud and as a consumer losing money after a bank account takeover. These challenges revealed a critical gap in the payments infrastructure: limited visibility into consumer behavior across the ecosystem,” says Lerato Matsio, CEO of Trudenty. “That’s why we’re building Trudenty, where privacy-preserving data sharing enables merchants, issuers and acquirers to share fraud risk intelligence to combat fraud and improve experiences for trusted consumers.”

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Open banking at Mastercard  

Through open banking, Mastercard is enabling a future where everyone has opportunities to benefit from their data, including more inclusive opportunities for lending, frictionless ways to pay recurring bills and AI-powered insights to protect their identity when opening and funding a bank account.  

Mastercard recently announced Connect Plus, a data-consent command center that helps consumers manage where, how and with whom their financial data is shared within one simple web application. To protect financial data as consumers link their bank accounts, Mastercard just unveiled its Account Owner Verification solution to combat device, individual and bank fraud through a single API, available on Mastercard Developers.  

Startups interested in participating in future Start Path program cohorts can apply here. Mastercard looks for companies with innovative solutions that demonstrate product-market fit for open banking, open finance or open data; strategic alignment through a commitment to democratizing financial services; stage maturity with investment raised in Seed, Series A or later and a product live in market that is generating revenue; and a team of experienced, diverse founders with relevant expertise. 

Source – Mastercard