Mastercard introduces Mastercard Track to aid ease of doing business

Mastercard has said it has introduced Mastercard Track in collaboration with Microsoft and that it’s a unique global trade platform that would simplify and enhance how companies around the world do businesses with each other.

A statement by Mastercard stated that, while parts of the B2B process have been digitised, large and costly gaps still remain, an estimated $500 billion in annual administrative costs and rising. These costs are added to the inefficiency of the nearly half of all global business transactions, $58 trillion that are still done on paper.

Mastercard Track, the statement said, would 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.

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“This adds hundreds of billions of dollars of costs and burdensome 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,” said Mr Michael Froman, vice chairman and president of strategic growth at Mastercard.

According to Froman, 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. He added that 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).

“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.

“By building Mastercard Track on Azure, Mastercard will be able to take advantage of our stringent security and compliance standards, our global footprint and our intelligent cloud solutions to help organisations of all sizes drive value from the back-office to the front of the enterprise,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president, Microsoft.

Acccording to the statement, Mastercard Track underscores the company’s commitment to address 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.