Originally posted on Mastercard's Beyond the Transaction blog

Written by Bruce Parker, Modo CEO

No seriously. What have I done?! I’ve fallen for payments, and now I can’t get up. I spend all day every day pondering how payments ought to be, and how a startup focused on payments ought to be. All the little and big things that are the state of our industry, and what a difference making a difference could make. Out of that passion for change, Modo was born.

The team at Modo believes we can make a difference by making payments fractionally better. Really, we only strive to be fractionally better. No overachievers here, just payments geeks who did the math.

Payments are at the center of how everything actually works. The inefficiencies in and between payments systems means that money that would otherwise address needs like providing for people going without potable water and without food, will actually never be used to help those people and give them a chance to leave their current living conditions. But the answer to this poverty is not throwing more money at the problem.

Money moves the world, so that means payments are the center of the universe— the smallest change can have a big impact.

The global economy is the big picture, so we’re talking Trillions (with a capital T). Imagine if we made things fractionally better, and that money went back into the economy. All we need to do is make our current payment systems, which work well 99.7 percent of the time, work well 99.97 percent of the time. With Trillions at stake, there’s leverage in that fractional increase. That additional 0.27 percent (or 27 basis points) could be the difference in rising the economic tides of millions of people. That’s why we’ve thrown ourselves into fixing the engine and has the potential to change the lives of everyone on earth.

Modo is conducting the exchange of payment event data on behalf of banks, payment providers, and their partners in order to address these market inefficiencies and make payments a little bit less complicated. Modo takes care of managing the data businesses need to exchange with their partners by providing security and building and managing the connections to their providers and counterparties – all while maintaining integrations as they change.

We joined the Mastercard Start Path program to work with some big names in the financial world to do just that. They are leveraging our cloud based services to enable payment interoperability and accelerate innovation with the shared goal of making payments a little better, to make the world better.