Mastercard revealed its plans to modernise the business-to-business (B2B) payment ecosystem by enhancing its Mastercard Track platform with a new product called Mastercard Track Business Payment Service.
Track was launched last year as a trade platform to address identity, compliance and payment management requirements. The platform will now feature all the company’s existing and future B2B payment products.
The payment solutions of the platform will be a collection of tools and services that are said to substantially improve and ease the way businesses pay and get paid.
The new Mastercard Track Business Payment Service, which will be the main product in the Track portfolio, has been developed as a single connection that brings together various payment types, greater control and richer data to streamline B2B transactions for suppliers and also buyers.
With the new business payment service, Mastercard said that it is offering a choice of how to pay and get paid through ACH/account-to-account and card-based payments into one solution.
The payments solutions company said that suppliers can set tailored payment preferences that suit their business, while buyers can discover suppliers easily with visibility into what type of payments they accept and under which conditions.
Built on the PCI and ISO standards to maximise automation and secure data exchange, the new business payment service is expected to speed up the reconciliation process by supporting all types of files. Mastercard said that supplier terms and conditions will be applied to payments via a centralised directory for transparency sake.
Furthermore, all the transactions are processed with the data that is required by the supplier. Remittance data, including buyer identification details and corresponding invoice numbers, will remove the guessing game of allocating funds with invoices, thereby making reconciliation easier and simplifying cash flow management, said Mastercard.
Mastercard Track Business Payment Service launch
The Mastercard Track Business Payment Service will be launched across the world, starting with the US market in the first half of next year. The product will be made available through supplier and buyer partners who will incorporate it into their current product offerings.
Currently, Mastercard is piloting the service in North America.
Mastercard commercial products executive vice president James Anderson said: “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.
“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.”
