Mastercard, on 12th September, in collaboration with Microsoft, introduced Mastercard Track, a unique global trade platform expected to simplify and enhance how companies engage in business globally.
While parts of the B2B process have been digitized, large and costly gaps still remain with an estimated 500 billion dollars in annual administrative costs and rising. These costs are added to the inefficiency of the nearly half of all global business transactions 58 trillion dollars that are still done in paper.
Mastercard Track will address these fundamental challenges by further streamlining and automating the procure-to-pay-process enabling businesses to manage business identity, compliance, and payments in a more efficient way.
“While there have been great improvements and innovations in the way consumers pay, the global B2B space remains highly inefficient and paper-based”, said Michael Froman, vice chairman and president of strategic growth at Mastercard.
“This is an addition to hundreds of billions of dollars of costs and unnecessary delays to global trade. Mastercard Track is a tool that will help reduce frictions in the global trading system and promote increased exports, especially, by small and medium-sized businesses,” Michael added.
Unlocking growth for businesses of all sizes
While consumers have become accustomed to a broader choice of technology solutions, businesses too are looking for speed, security, and convenience in their everyday operations.
From reducing the steps it takes to identify a business partner, to making the payments process simpler and more transparent, Mastercard Track has the potential to unlock economic growth and to level the playing field for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s).
“Together with Mastercard, we’re helping companies around the world accelerate the pace of their own transformation by creating a more efficient buying and selling process at scale,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president, Microsoft adding that by building Mastercard Track on Azure, Mastercard will be able to take advantage of their stringent security and compliance standards, their global footprint and intelligent cloud solutions to help organizations of all sizes drive value from the back-office to the front of the enterprise.
Mastercard Track underscores the company’s commitment to addressing several pain points in the global business environment. The new platform draws on and complements the whole range of Mastercard innovation and B2B assets, from account-to-account and card payment solutions to fraud management, data analytics and payment gateway services.