Kunai Partners With Mastercard to Modernize Legacy Payments Infrastructure

Mastercard is a global financial technology company that provides payment processing services to merchants, banks, and other financial institutions. Founded in 1966, Mastercard has since grown to become one of the world's largest payment networks, processing billions of transactions every year in over 200 countries and territories.

Mastercard offers a range of payment solutions, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards, as well as mobile payments and other digital payment technologies. The company is headquartered in Purchase, New York and employs over 20,000 people worldwide.

Since its founding, Mastercard has been creating systems and products to help businesses focus on productive tasks by bypassing messy payment processing and bank reconciliations. In that vein, they recognized that small businesses were still sinking valuable time into manually processing and accounting.

While larger companies could afford to invest in powerful financial stacks to help automate and facilitate vital accounting processes and digital payments, smaller businesses could not. Many were still stuck on outdated payment methods like checks, money orders, and wire transfers as well as manual processing procedures for invoicing, reconciling, processing, and receipt tracking.

Mastercard set out to create a modern digital solution that businesses could easily integrate into their existing tech stack. To that end, Mastercard partnered with Kunai to design and build a tool that could help smaller businesses streamline their payments processes– from sending, receiving, reconciling, generating, and more.

Kunai presented Mastercard with a plan: to build a prototype system that stitched together powerful fintech technologies with Microsoft Excel, the most widely used enterprise software across this demographic.

This E2E financial stack would serve as a singular nexus for businesses of any size to process online payments and migrate legacy systems into the modern age of the internet.

To start, Kunai leaned on their deep partnerships with Plaid, Stripe, and Twilio to design the core stack. Plaid would be used to seamlessly link to thousands of financial institutions, Stripe would be used to facilitate payments and all related administrative tasks, and Twilio would be used to build a convenient messaging platform to help organizations establish and maintain communication.

Leveraging these partner APIs, Kunai prototyped the build in Excel and created a tool that Mastercard could use to provide businesses of any size a one-stop shop for processing payments online.

With the prototype having met great success, Kunai went on to build and bring to market the final build.

Having been built on Excel, businesses could easily set up and use Mastercard’s new software within the week without having to invest a large sum of money into cutting-edge financial stacks.

The resulting technology supports a wide variety of online transactions with real-time payments, automatically tracks receipts to transactions for easy invoice reconciliations, and increases the velocity of money movement across all sectors of business.

“From start to finish, working with Mastercard on this project was incredible. We’re excited to continue our partnership with them into the future as we collaborate closely on future projects.” - Sandeep Sood, CEO @Kunai