Mastercard teams up with bunq for an open banking/AI partnership

Card giant Mastercard recently made an announcement with bunq, where the two firms revealed their new partnership. The goal of the team-up is to create an open banking and AI tool at Money 20/20 Europe.

Bunq and Mastercard Team Up To Deliver A New Solution

Bunq and Mastercard have been implementing open banking in various regions of Europe, adding features to countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The idea is to roll out the same features and enable the same opportunities across Europe in time. Thanks to these features, bunq users can connect any and all external bank accounts onto a single app.

Bianca Zwart, Bunq’s chief of staff, commented on the new partnership and the firms’ goals, stating that the team-up will allow the company’s users to get a full overview of their finances in their existing application. They can add any external bank account and conveniently manage their finances from a single place. “So that in itself is already quite cool, but we’re adding AI to the mix as well,” she said.

Meanwhile, over 12.5 million users will be able to access these features. While Mastercard is providing the open banking part, bunq is using artificial intelligence from its GenAI chatbot, Finn, which launched in late 2023.

Commenting on Mastercard’s behalf, Bart Willaert, the firm’s EVP, said “It’s a great use case because it makes it much easier for bunq’s customer to manage your finances. Open banking allows you in a very slick way to share data here. You actually share it in a consented way, but you give it back to the consumers to have an overview. What bunq has done very nicely, is that by using AI, it becomes so easy.”

Who Stands To Benefit The Most?

Looking toward the future, Zwart pointed out that the combination of these technologies can provide practically endless possibilities. She believes that this will be extremely beneficial for the firm’s target audience, as the two companies’ products are for international people.

Expats, digital nomads, freelancers, and similar groups will be able to benefit from the joint solution, especially since they often have to simultaneously manage multiple bank accounts, sometimes even in different countries. At the very least, they need multiple bank accounts, which tends to cause friction that the new partnership and the product it stands to offer can remove, and make the experience seamless.

Furthermore, the move will also make Bunq the first Dutch bank to use open banking. The firm noticed that there had been a significant surge in engagement lately, and 40% of surveyed users reported an increase in their use of the app within only two weeks of launch.

This suggests that it is simple to use the new features, and once they try it out, users typically do not go back to the previous system.