Mastercard teams up with SEEBURGER to boost Bill Pay solutions

By Megha Bhattacharya

Mastercard today signed an agreement with SEEBURGER in a bid to provide people and businesses across Europe more choice, flexibility and control across a range of real-time request to pay solutions, with an initial focus on Bill Payments. The collaboration will see the integration of Mastercard’s pay-based technology with SEEBURGER’s Business Integration Suite. The development will enable businesses to transform their billing and collection process for end customers. The agreement includes a six-month pilot project to test and ready the solution for the market, initially across Europe.

Roberto Tittarelli, Executive Vice President New Payment Platforms at Mastercard, commented, “By partnering with SEEBURGER, who bring leading business payment integration technology, we can transform the bill payment experience for consumers and billers across Europe. The combination of request to pay technology and real-time payments, will enable an alternative to direct debit and biller-direct models, providing more optionality for different customer segments, reducing time, inconvenience and risk of inaccuracy for payers and billers alike.”

According to Mastercard, the collective aim will be to create significant value by digitising the billing presentment process; digitising customer communications; presenting consumer offers; and enabling accelerated cash flows through better visibility of payment statuses. Bill Payment services also offer financial institutions increased mobile application engagement by their customers and additional revenue opportunities.

Mastercard’s Bill Pay solution enables consumers to view, manage and pay their regular household and other bills with flexibility and control.

“For both consumers and billers, the payment process can be frustrating, time-consuming and costly. We are pleased to be working alongside Mastercard to help streamline and improve the process,” said Ulf Persson, SVP Global Business Development for SEEBURGER. “Our ability to integrate virtually anything aligns well with Mastercard’s initiative to create a better payment experience for customers.”

Recently, Amsterdam-headquartered VEON announced a partnership with Mastercard to boost digital financial services in the markets of Russia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. The collaboration is expected to strengthen VEON’s services with customised products, aiming to bolster the financial and digital inclusion of traditionally underserved consumers in each geography.