MasterCard Mentors Brazilian FinTechs

MasterCard is partnering with Brazilian banking giant Itaú and Redpoint eVentures to foster local tech startups.

Through Cubo, a startup initiative supported by Itaú and Redpoint eVentures, MasterCard executives from the company’s products and solutions team will provide mentoring to the program’s resident entrepreneurs, ZDNet reported on Friday (July 1). The startups will also have access to MasterCard’s APIs.

“Having a company like MasterCard within Cubo fills us with pride. It’s great to be able to offer to the resident startups the innovative tools of a leading company in the payments space, which can help [entrepreneurs] to evolve further and reach new heights in their businesses,” Itaú IT superintendent and Cubo co-founder Erica Jannini told ZDNet.

Cubo startups will also receive mentoring and services from other companies, including Accenture, Cisco and Microsoft.

Last month, MasterCard announced the kickoff of the 2016 summer session of its Start Path Global program — a class offering support to the next generation of commerce and FinTech startups from around the world.

The effort provides innovative early-stage startups with access to an immersive six-month program where they receive guidance and support from MasterCard on scaling their operations and entering new markets and industries. This new class of companies, selected from 500 applications across 60 countries, represents a diverse group in terms of team size, level of funding, revenue and sales pipeline.

Though all of the startups touch the commerce space in some way, Stephane Wyper, Global Lead for MasterCard Start Path, recently told Karen Webster, they represent a wide range of focuses in their efforts to disrupt and innovate traditional financial services and commerce.

From startups in blockchain to conversational commerce, smart transportation and even cybersecurity and personal money management, the group all can find common ground in their desire to solve for the commerce experience.