With consumers increasingly turning to fintechs to round out their financial services and get access to those services on their terms, the need to partner with providers of open banking platforms is growing rapidly. To facilitate such partnerships, open-banking network MX Technologies Inc. late Wednesday announced the formalization of its partner network and the introduction of the MX Partner Portal.
As part of the formal introduction of its partner network, which MX says has doubled in size the past year, MX says it is putting additional support structure into its partnerships to offer fintechs more collaborative tools to help develop and launch open-banking applications, says Corinne Bartow, vice president of business development at Lehi, Utah-based MX.
Up to now, MX has had no formal partner network, but as the barriers to sharing data through open banking applications erode, Bartow says MX expects its partnerships with fintechs to explode. MX partners include fintechs that embed MX solutions in their products, have complementary products, or recommend MX solutions to their clients.
“The ecosystem we play in is growing in terms of the number of participants and interconnectivity between those participants,” Bartow says. “The days of these players being a single-stack vendor in open finance is not realistic anymore. Banking is a one-size-fits-all game, but open finance is not, and if we don’t partner, we are not serving the consumer.”
In the past year, MX has struck partnerships with Astra Inc., Boss Insights, Bottomline, Technologies Inc., Celero Solutions, Dwolla Inc., FormFree Holdings Corp., Mahalo Banking, MeridianLink, Moov Financial Inc., Payveris, a division of Paymentus Holdings Inc., Pinwheel, Qolo, Rize Money Inc., TrueNorth, and upSWOT Inc. All told, MX has signed 29 partners in the past year to bring its total to more than 60, the company says,
MX says its new portal provides fintechs with a one-stop destination where they can find resources such as training and enablement, product updates, marketing, and client support. Bartow says it is a resource for MX partners to exchange information as a community, as opposed to one-on-one emails, for example.
“The collaborative opportunities through the portal allow us to open up access to financial data to a lot of players,” Bartow says. “The portal provides a set of tools for us to maintain a high level of support, service, and collaboration with our partners.”
Looking ahead, Bartow says MX plans to continue adding new features and functionality to the portal to help partners streamline the onboarding of new customers.
“Our partner community is growing and diversifying,” says Bartow. “We are at the start of an exciting journey.”