FundingShield, a cloud-based firm providing fintech solutions for risk, compliance and fraud prevention, entered a partnership with Mastercard to leverage its open banking platform delivered by Finicity, a Mastercard subsidiary.
FundingShield provides technology products and SaaS solutions that have been used to secure the funds of over $2.5 trillion in mortgage closings, according to the company.
“FundingShield has over 95 percent coverage of licensed service providers in the real estate, mortgage, closing and settlement space in our live repository,” FundingShield CEO Ike Suri said in a release. “This partnership with Mastercard allows us to leverage its open banking connectivity of over 95 percent of U.S. based deposit accounts for consumer-permissioned access to real-time, bank-sourced data to expand our B2B and B2B2C payment verification solutions for clients.
“With this partnership, we deepen our offerings in the mortgage, title and real estate space as a one-stop shop. Further, this is a natural extension of our scalable and malleable solutions with applications across numerous sectors. We are actively engaged and delivering loss prevention tools for accounts payable, treasury, and supplier risk management teams across several industries.”
FundingShield’s solutions manage risk for firms facing a surge of cybersecurity threats like hacking and fraud. Its payment verification solutions support bank account ownership that is confirmed with consumer-permissioned data from the banking institution where the account is held, using Mastercard’s open banking platform.
This source data is then used to help approve payments ahead of a FundingShield client initiating a wire, ACH, or other payment method from the customer’s banking institution.
This partnership expands FundingShield’s offering within the real estate, mortgage and title sector with solutions that protect buyers, sellers, brokers, bank and non-bank lenders, warehouse lenders, and title and settlement entities. More broadly, the firm’s solutions provide risk management surrounding payments to vendors, suppliers, and other outgoing fund recipients in markets where cybersecurity experts estimate cybercrime costs to eclipse $10 trillion annually by 2025, company leaders said.
“Payment fraud is growing across all industries in the United States with little to no recourse and limited avenues for insurance coverage for impacted parties,” Suri added. “Companies need to equip their staff with loss prevention and risk management tools to protect against the evolving threat actors and fraud schemes. Cybersecurity starts at the top, from a leadership perspective.”