Yahoo Finance Mastercard (MA), Spire Tie Up to Ease Financial Management
Mastercard Incorporated MA recently collaborated with the Open Banking services provider of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Spire in a bid to combine the latter’s “Ingage” platform with MA's Merchant Identifier solution for improved digital banking user experiences in the region.
Upon integration of Mastercard’s Merchant Identifier solution with Spire “Ingage,” which is an AI-equipped financial wellbeing platform, real-time merchant data across diversified categories recognized by both banks and customers will be offered. With customers gaining a seamless and comprehensive understanding of their banking transactional details via the latest integration, banks might save a lot of time due to reduced need to verify statements as a result of minimal inquiries put forward by customers.
Mastercard seems to have made a prudent choice by selecting Spire to make digital banking hassle-free for 65 million GCC consumers. This is because Spire is focused on easing the management of consumer finances and facilitating seamless decision-making through personalized financial services and insights suite to retail banking customers. Mastercard and Spire share the mutual endeavor of enhancing financial management by consumers and hence joined forces.
Apart from strengthening its presence across the GCC, the latest initiative also highlights two other notable targets of Mastercard. The first one is to bring more people and businesses under the ambit of a booming digital economy in order to stay abreast with the trend. Meanwhile, the second endeavor is to expand its presence across the rapidly growing Open Banking space.
Mastercard is committed to its strategy of collaborating with well-renowned organizations and undertaking significant investments to drive digitization across the globe. Meanwhile, MA makes continuous efforts to encourage more individuals and businesses to seamlessly embrace Open Banking payments, owing to the numerous benefits offered by it in the form of a varied set of choices, enhanced services and seamless outcomes. Mastercard already boasts of a robust presence in the Open Banking market, and the technology leader in the global payments industry resorts to continuous efforts to sustain its position in the space.
As a testament to the same, Mastercard acquired the leading European Open Banking technology provider Aiia last year. Aiia, a Mastercard company now, powered the innovative Open Banking payments feature called Pay by link, which MA launched in June 2022. The feature is already available across the Nordics and is projected to reach entire Europe through 2022. Apart from the buyout of Aiia, Mastercard acquired Finicity in 2020, which connects users' bank accounts with other payment apps.
Shares of Mastercard have lost 12% year to date compared with the industry’s decline of 15%.
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Zacks Rank & Key Picks
Mastercard currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the Business Services space include Huron Consulting Group Inc. HURN, FTI Consulting, Inc. FCN and Automatic Data Processing, Inc. ADP. While Huron Consulting currently flaunts a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), FTI Consulting and Automatic Data Processing carry a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
The bottom line of Huron Consulting outpaced estimates in each of the trailing four quarters, the average surprise being 29.97%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for HURN’s 2022 earnings suggests an improvement of 22.6% from the year-ago reported figure. The same for revenues suggests year-over-year growth of 13.5%. The consensus mark for Huron Consulting’s 2022 earnings has moved 5.3% north in the past 60 days.
FTI Consulting’s earnings outpaced estimates in three of the trailing four quarters and missed once, the average surprise being 24.40%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for FCN’s 2022 earnings suggests an improvement of 1.6% from the year-ago reported figure. The same for revenues suggests growth of 6.2%. The consensus mark for FTI Consulting’s 2022 earnings has moved 0.9% north in the past 60 days.
The bottom line of Automatic Data Processing outpaced estimates in three of the last four quarters and missed once, the average surprise being 6.23%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for ADP's 2022 earnings suggests an improvement of 15.8% from the year-ago reported figure. The same for revenues suggests growth of 9.5% from a year ago. The consensus mark for Automatic Data Processing’s 2022 earnings has moved 2.2% north in the past 60 days.
Shares of Huron Consulting and FTI Consulting have gained 25.9% and 11.6%, respectively, year to date. Meanwhile, Automatic Data Processing stock has declined 15.4% in the same time frame.
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