NFW 2023: How Saxo Bank and Mastercard brought open banking on the agenda for thousands of investors

September 27, 2023 | Louise Basse

This week, we’re beyond excited to be participating at this year’s edition of Nordic Fintech Week in Copenhagen.  

As the first speaker on the main stage, our very own Bart Willaert, EVP Mastercard Open Banking, sat down with Stig Tørnes, Global Co-head of operations at Saxo Bank, to discuss how the partnership between Mastercard and Saxo Bank has brought open banking on the agenda for thousands of investors.  

Did you miss the panel debate? No worries. We created a summary with the key takeaways for you below.   

A partnership based on trust and convenience  

Saxo Bank and Mastercard recently announced that they’ve teamed up to create a simpler and more convenient payment journey that allows Saxo Bank’s customers to instantly top up their Saxo investment account with open banking payments.   

“Before the partnership with Mastercard, our customers had to login to their online bank and initiate a payment to fund their Saxo account. Following that, they had to go back to Saxo’s platform to make sure that the money had actually arrived, Saxo’s Stig Tørnes, said on stage and continued:  

“But with the new open banking option, customers can fund their accounts instantly. That means customers no longer need to leave our platform to do the payment, and that is very convenient.”  

But convenience is also dependent on trust, said Bart Willaert:  

“When we build products at Mastercard, we always consider carefully how consumers can feel the trust behind the convenient solution. We make sure that it's transparent how you consent to data with open banking, and how data privacy by the design is at the core of our products. All of that is behind the scenes, and that ultimately adds to the trust which then allows you to bring frictionless experiences to payments journeys.”  

Enhancing customer experience with open banking  

Since Saxo Bank launched the new open banking solution with Mastercard, conversion rates have increased as the payment friction has been reduced, Stig Tørnes explained on stage:  

“We went live with the new solution in March this year, and after just two months, the open banking payment option performed 20% of all the incoming payments. I think that's a number that speaks very much for itself. It has been an extremely powerful move and has been received well by our customers.”  

Commenting on the benefits of open banking payments in top up use cases such as Saxo Bank, Bart Willaert elaborated:  

“Open banking is key in delivering that frictionless experience, and I think that’s much better than having to enter long card numbers or switching between different environments in order to add funds to your Saxo account,” he said and pointed out: 

“When you look at different payment use cases, it’s a very broad space that includes paying bills, going traveling, making an in-store payment, doing ecommerce and much more. All these different use cases require different payments approaches, and that's why we at Mastercard have a multi-rail payment strategy that offer multiple solutions that are best addressed for these use cases, giving consumers and our partners the possibility and the options to make the payment.“ 

Get in touch and learn more about how you can create better customer experiences with open banking or head over to our open banking blog for more inspirational use cases.