Mastercard today announced it is expanding its partnership with Zoho to bring small business owners around the world a comprehensive array of products and services to make running their enterprise easier, more efficient and more profitable.
Every business is on a quest to increase efficiency and productivity; for small business owners it can be a matter of survival. With Zoho’s platform, Mastercard is able to offer its small business customers access to a suite of marketing, accounting and CRM tools to automate and digitize time-intensive, paper-based processes. Scaling its existing partnership from India to the rest of the world, Mastercard and Zoho are enabling simpler business operations for SMBs globally.
In fact, small businesses account for nearly 50 percent of the world’s GDP and employ almost two thirds of the global workforce1. Through Mastercard’s financial institution and acquiring partners, small businesses will now have access to various solutions such as enterprise resource planning and finance software, customer relationship management, and marketing solutions, amongst others.
Zoho is a cloud-based platform accessible via website and app and can be delivered via API. Zoho’s technology stack is flexible, taking the heavy lift off the integration process and making bringing solutions to market faster. Mastercard and Zoho shared solutions will be available later this year.
You can also read my review of Zoho here.
Visa, MasterCard and Ant International launch “Know Your Agent” framework
Posted in Commentary with tags Ant International, MasterCard, Visa on September 12, 2026 by itnerdVisa, Mastercard, and Ant International have a new Know Your Agent (KYA) interoperability framework. At first glance this sounds good. But we’ll need a very high level of trust that these “agents” are tied down.
Ted Miracco, CEO, Approov:
“Know Your Agent is an important first step, and it’s encouraging to see the networks aligning on it. However knowing who built or authorized an agent is not the same as knowing what is actually making the request. A key or a certificate proves someone holds a credential. It doesn’t prove the software using it is the authentic agent, unmodified, and not one of a thousand copies. We learned that lesson securing mobile apps. As agents start spending money, trust has to be established at every request, not just at onboarding.
“Certification only tells you what an agent should be. Merchants and payment APIs also need proof of what is actually running, verified cryptographically, not just inferred from behavior after the fact. The framework sets the accountability rules. The next step is making them enforceable within the software itself.”
This is a good start. But more needs to be done to make something like KYA useful. Let’s hope it gets useful in a hurry.
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