A Guide to Visa and Mastercard’s API Ecosystems in Open Banking, Embedded Finance & Payments

If you’re building in fintech, payments, or financial services, APIs are at the core of what makes seamless transactions, real-time data access, and embedded finance possible. Whether you’re a startup launching a neobank, a marketplace optimising payouts, or a financial institution enhancing fraud detection, the right APIs can make or break your product experience.

Visa and Mastercard have built extensive API product ecosystems that power everything from Open Banking and real-time payments to card issuing and fraud prevention. Their APIs help businesses connect to financial data, process instant payouts, issue branded payment cards, and secure transactions against fraud.

In this post, I provide a high-level comparison of Visa and Mastercard’s API offerings, covering how they enable Open Banking, embedded payments, fintech infrastructure, and security. This is just the starting point. Both offer a vast array of APIs, and I’ll be diving deeper into specific areas in future posts.

Open Banking & Financial Data APIs

If you’re building a fintech product, Open Banking APIs are essential for accessing financial data, verifying accounts, and initiating payments with user consent. These APIs are widely used by fintech startups, digital banks, lending platforms, and accounting software that rely on real-time access to customer financial data.

Mastercard provides Open Banking APIs such as Open Banking Connect, Open Banking Protect, and Open Banking Insights, helping businesses aggregate account data, prevent fraud, and gain financial insights. With its acquisition of Finicity, Mastercard has strengthened its position in credit decisioning, offering tools that help financial institutions, mortgage lenders, and personal finance apps assess credit risk and verify accounts in real time.

Visa’s approach to Open Banking comes through Tink, its European open banking platform. Tink enables businesses to connect to multiple banks, aggregate financial data, and initiate payments across different accounts. This makes it a valuable tool for financial service providers, payment processors, and fintech companies that need seamless access to consumer and business accounts.

Embedded Payments & Real-Time Payouts

If your business involves e-commerce, gig economy payments, payroll, or international transactions, embedded payment and real-time payout APIs can streamline the way you move money. These APIs allow businesses to send funds directly to cards, bank accounts, or digital wallets, ensuring fast and frictionless payments.

Visa Direct is one of the key solutions in this space, enabling real-time payments for person-to-person transfers, business payouts, and merchant settlements. It’s widely used by companies in industries such as ride-sharing, insurance, payroll, and remittances, allowing funds to be sent instantly to recipients. Visa Direct integrates with banks, payment processors, and fintech platforms, making it a scalable solution for businesses looking to facilitate global payouts.

Mastercard offers similar capabilities through Mastercard Send, which supports real-time payments to bank accounts and digital wallets. For businesses handling international transactions, Mastercard’s Cross-Border Services API allows financial institutions and remittance providers to facilitate multi-currency payments with real-time tracking. These APIs are commonly used by payroll providers, fintech platforms, and digital wallet providers looking to expand their global payment capabilities.

Both Visa and Mastercard also offer solutions for businesses that want to integrate digital payment acceptance. Visa’s Acceptance Solutions API makes it easier for businesses to embed digital payments into their platforms, while Mastercard’s Bill Pay Exchange API streamlines bill payments and recurring transactions for financial service providers and fintech companies.

Fintech Infrastructure & Card Issuing APIs

For fintech startups, neobanks, and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers, card issuing APIs are critical for launching digital and physical payment cards. These APIs power everything from prepaid and debit cards to credit and corporate expense management solutions.

Mastercard’s Developer API suite includes card issuing APIs that allow businesses to create branded debit and credit cards, integrate digital wallets, and enable secure transactions with tokenisation. MDES (Mastercard Digital Enablement Service) enhances security by tokenising card details for digital transactions.

Visa provides similar capabilities through its Visa Token Service (VTS) and Visa Card Issuing APIs, widely used by fintech startups and neobanks looking to issue virtual and physical payment cards. Visa also offers the Visa Installments API, allowing businesses to introduce pay-over-time solutions, and Visa B2B Connect, which helps streamline secure cross-border business payments.

Fraud, Risk & Security APIs

Fraud prevention APIs play a critical role in reducing chargebacks, detecting fraudulent activity, and ensuring compliance with security regulations. These APIs provide identity verification, transaction risk scoring, and authentication tools to enhance payment security.

Visa offers fraud prevention solutions through its Cybersource API, which helps businesses minimise fraud and prevent chargebacks using AI-powered risk scoring. Additional tools like Visa Risk Manager and 3D Secure 2.0 allow businesses to verify transactions and enhance payment security, particularly for e-commerce.

Mastercard’s fraud prevention APIs include Ethoca Consumer Clarity, which helps businesses manage chargebacks, and Open Banking Protect, designed to enhance security in financial data sharing. Mastercard’s NuDetect API uses behavioral analytics to identify potential fraud before it happens, while Identity Check (Mastercard’s implementation of 3D Secure 2.0) strengthens authentication for digital payments.

Conclusion and Links to API Documentation

This is just an overview of how Visa and Mastercard’s API ecosystems work. If you’d like to explore further, check out the following developer documentation links. This is a good starting point for Visa’s API Product Documentation and here is a great overview of Mastercard’s API Product range. As you can see, both offer an almost overwhelming array of APIs. In future posts, I’ll be diving deeper into these docs to explain the API products in non-technical terms.