Global technology partner program Mastercard Engage announced the addition of open banking to its platform last week to bring secure connectivity and onboarding processes to its partners.

Mastercard Engage, an application programming interface (API)-driven platform, connects businesses with technology partners to build, launch or grow payments solutions, according to a Mastercard statement. Through its connections, Mastercard Engage partners can verify payments and payouts, check balances, reduce payment failures and minimize fraud.

“We enable consumers or small businesses to permission their own data and to put that data to work,” Andy Sheehan, executive vice president of open banking at Mastercard’s Finicity, told Bank Automation News, noting the open banking program provides access to additional insights through financial tools that drive better decision making.

“The addition of open banking is really formalizing these important, relatively new, capabilities to the Engage partnership program,” Sheehan said.

Mastercard Engage also offers payments solutions to digital-first providers, issuers, merchants, fintechs and internet of things manufacturers, according to the Mastercard website.

During the last year, Engage partners have helped clients launch new payments solutions on more than 250 million accounts, according to the statement.

Engage is about “bringing our secure connectivity and onboarding processes to partners and ultimately jumpstarting their partnerships with a specific bank, business and fintech,” he said. The program’s initial technology partners include Dwolla, Fintech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technology, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio, Sheehan said.

San Francisco-based Synctera, for one, is a full-stack platform that offers “everything from know your customer through verifying bank accounts, through … printing a debit card and managing accounts,” Synctera co-founder and Chief Executive Peter Hazlehurst told BAN.

“What we do with Mastercard and with Finicity and with open banking, is we make it really easy for the user, in a trusted way, to give this personal financial management (PFM) tool permission to have access to [their] data,” Hazlehurst said.

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