Pollinate, Mastercard Team For Filmmaker Competition To Highlight SMB Resilience

Pollinate, which equips banks with a toolkit for small businesses, is teaming with Mastercard to roll out its “Ingenious” filmmaker competition that will highlight the resilience of small businesses amid the pandemic, according to a Friday (June 25) announcement.

“By combining our shared passion for small business, ‘Ingenious’ is intended to uncover diverse small business stories and connect the talents of filmmakers – both aspiring and professional – with the entrepreneurs in their communities,” Pollinate said in the announcement.

Filmmakers are tasked with telling the story of a small business in “the context of their community” through a video ranging between two and three minutes, highlighting how “reinvention, reimagining, reconnecting or entrepreneurship has enabled them to succeed.”

The competition will run from June 25 to August 6. Winners will be awarded for firms that best handle the themes of “Loyal to Local,” “Get Digital,” “Get Capital” and “Get Paid.” They will be announced on Sept. 1.

In describing the “Get Paid” theme, Pollinate wrote that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have “been trending toward digital banking and payments, which has been accelerated by COVID-19.” It noted that digitization can simplify payments and ensure correct billing.

PYMNTS reported in March that Pollinate had notched $50 million to bring its software business to North America and to grow its platform technology. In August 2020, news surfaced that Mastercard and Pollinate had agreed to a strategic collaboration.

“Our work with Pollinate and the wider issuer and acquirer solutions ecosystem supports our collective goal to offer digital payment solutions for small and medium-sized businesses to deliver a seamless experience for their customers in a time of need,” Zahir Khoja, executive vice president of merchant solutions and partnerships at Mastercard, said in an announcement at the time.

Pollinate’s technology functions as a data and digital experience layer based on the cloud that can sit above the present infrastructure of a bank. To that end, it enables a bank to grow into the acquiring business or expand its present operations without making changes to its infrastructure.