Mastercard Track Expands Focus To Faster B2B Payments, Data Collection

Mastercard is launching a new business-to-business (B2B) payment ecosystem to streamline and simplify transactions between suppliers and sellers.

The Mastercard Track Business Payment Service is the first global open-loop commercial service built to automate payments between the world’s suppliers and buyers.

“The business world has accelerated, but the payments that enable it are stuck in neutral – paper checks and manual invoicing need to be scrapped, man-hours need to be applied to more strategic roles and back-offices need tools to help streamline operations,” said James Anderson, executive vice president, commercial products. “Mastercard Track helps supplier and buyer partners tackle the systemic challenges of business-to-business payments, reinventing how businesses send and receive funds so B2B payments can keep pace with innovation and liberate enterprises from the inefficiencies throughout the system.”

Mastercard Track was originally launched in 2018 as a trade platform to address identity, compliance and payment management needs. The trade directory has registered more than 210 million entities worldwide and is central to all current and future B2B payment products, the company said.

The Track Business Payment Service will roll out globally, starting with the U.S. in the first half of 2020.

“We believe now is the time to reinvent this $125 trillion ecosystem,” said Anderson. “Having all types of payments under one roof, connections to virtually every business-payment partner across the globe and innovation that already digitizes and automates legacy infrastructure, Mastercard is the partner uniquely positioned to deliver unmatched capabilities to vastly improve the way businesses conduct trade at scale.”

Worldwide, 56 countries have adopted or are in the process of adopting real-time payment systems, Andrea Gilman, senior vice president of product management and new payments at Mastercard, said in a July interview. That number represents 89 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).

A number of financial institutions spent time and money to link to The Clearing House. This year is likely to usher in use cases and applications on top of those rails, a movement that will include significant B2B payments activity.