- Finovate Best of Show winner Zeta announced a new partnership with Mastercard.
- The five-year collaboration included an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors.
- The funding gives Zeta a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Zeta, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateWest Digital 2020, has announced a five-year global partnership with Mastercard. The collaboration, which also featured an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors, will enable the two companies to jointly launch credit cards via Zeta’s full stack, cloud-based, API-ready card processing platform. The two firms plan to issue between 30 and 40 million debit and credit cards over the course of the partnership and process $60 billion in total payment value.
“With Zeta’s next-gen credit card processing platform, we are fundamentally rewiring how issuers launch credit card programs by offering new paradigms over legacy mainframe systems,” Zeta co-founder and CEO Bhavin Turakhia said. He noted that Zeta enables issuers to increase their lending books, reduce costs with pay-as-you-go SaaS billing, improve customer engagement and satisfaction, and leverage the platform to launch new solutions and iterate faster.
The funding gives the San Francisco, California-based fintech a valuation of $1.5 billion, further solidifying the company’s unicorn status it achieved last May when Zeta scored $240 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Zeta’s flagship solution, Tachyon, is a modern credit processing stack that provides integrated credit and loan processing. The platform spans the entire credit card lifecycle from issuance, core, and payments to BNPL loans, fraud and risk monitoring, rewards, and more. Zeta’s APIs enable issuers to create new revenue lines as BIN/balance sheet sponsors by providing co-brands, fintechs, and affinity partners with a complete banking-as-a-service and embeddable banking platform. The company also provides a suite of managed services including servicing, collections, and more.
Mastercard EVO for Products and Innovation Sandeep Malhotra underscored the capabilities of Zeta’s platform. “By deploying Zeta’s credit processing stack, issuers will have an opportunity to grow their user base, drive higher usage, and enter new geographical markets while accelerating the cashless revolution around the world.”
The relationship between Zeta and Mastercard extends back to 2018, when Zeta entered Mastercard’s Start Path engagement program. More recently, Zeta joined the Mastercard Developers Partner Network, Engage, which will give the fintech access to the Mastercard network. This will enable Zeta to pre-integrate or bundle solutions such as Mastercard’s Digital First and Fintech Express progams that support customer KYC and verification operations, as well as instant digital card issuance and provisioning.
Founded in 2015, Zeta began this year with the announcement that its card processing business grew to more than 10 million cards with more than 300 million transactions a year globally.
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