Microsoft and MasterCard partner to improve global trade costs with business platform

Mastercard and Microsoft have joined forces to offer a global trading platform that helps businesses manage their supply chain more effectively, saving billions of pounds every year.

Mastercard Track, built on Microsoft Azure, automates the way businesses run their procure-to-pay-process, helping them comply with regulations, manage business identity and process payments more efficiently. It will also help identify global opportunities in the supply chain, helping businesses make the process of finding and onboarding new suppliers less resource-intensive.

Mastercard has signed up nine networks to help push its Basware, Birchstreet, Coupa, GT Nexus, Jaggaer, Ivalua, Liaison, Tradeshift and Tungsten. Customers of these partners will be able to access more than 150 million company registrations worldwide and 500 compliance lists to find out more about potential suppliers.

"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 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."

The next stage of Mastercard Track is to introduce cash flow visibility so customers can see when they're expected to receive payments and how much they're due to be paid across all the networks they're part of and however they're set up (account-based, card-based or bank transfer). 

"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 of Microsoft. 

"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 organizations of all sizes drive value from the back-office to the front of the enterprise."