Mastercard and BOK Financial Expand Payments Partnership

Mastercard has launched an expanded payments partnership with Oklahoma’s BOK Financial.

The collaboration, announced Tuesday (Jan. 30), makes Mastercard the exclusive payments network for BOK’s debit and commercial portfolios, and expands the company’s relationship with BOK’s TransFund processing businesses.

“Both companies will build an innovative, inclusive, and sustainable future in banking, grounded in the shared values of advancing the communities they serve,” Mastercard said in a news release.

According to the release, the partnership will, among other things, leverage Mastercard’s open banking technology to “enable seamless account opening and consumer and small business lending solutions​.”

In addition, the partnership gives BOK’s customers access to Mastercard’s cyber and intelligence solutions, with digital identity and tokenization technology to ensure their transactions are secure.

The partnership comes at a time when — despite feeling satisfied with their banks’ security measures — half of American consumers think their financial institutions need to take further steps to protect their assets and information, particularly for non-routine transactions. 

“Consumer Authentication Preferences for Online Banking and Transactions,” a PYMNTS and Entersekt collaboration, found that banks typically meet basic online security expectations but fall short on providing the security options and features their customers want to see.

“Our study also reveals that nearly three times as many consumers now prefer to access their bank accounts using smartphones rather than computers, with security playing a pivotal role in this shift,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “While most consumers now view smartphones and computers as equally secure, many see biometric authentication measures, which smartphones tend to provide, as the most secure way to authenticate a transaction.”

Last week saw Mastercard team up with The Clearing House (TCH) for an extended partnership focused on real-time payments (RTP).

To discuss the collaboration, PYMNTS sat down with Lee Alexander, executive vice president and chief information officer at TCH, who shared how both companies plan to integrate new instant payment use cases.

“Using the RTP rail is going to allow financial institutions to innovate and allow the banks themselves to accommodate that innovation in a much better and a more scalable way. That’s the future,” Alexander said. “It’s about building capabilities to support new and emerging areas of interest for financial institutions.”