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Middle East to see fastest payment cards growth

The Middle East and Africa region is projected to post the fastest growth rate for payment cards during the next few years leading up to 2017, according to top officials at Network International, a leading payment solutions provider in the Middle East.

Bhairav Trivedi speaking at Network International’s seventh User Conference. — Supplied photo

Abdulla Qassem, chairman of Network International, was speaking at Network International’s seventh User Conference, which brought together financial institutions, the company’s merchant partners and retailers to discuss the developments in the payments sector.

“The Middle East and Africa markets are teeming with opportunities, and as the payment infrastructure becomes more developed, we believe the region will witness the fastest growth rate for charge, credit and debit cards across the 2012-2017 period,” said Qassem. “As customers demand ingenious and convenient payment technologies that also offer the highest level of security, we believe the next level of innovation will be in the areas of mobile payments and e-commerce.”

Network International also took the opportunity to update its partners about the company’s achievements in 2013. Bhairav Trivedi, chief executive officer, Network International, said: “In the last three years, we have doubled the volume of transactions processed, and have reached almost 400 million transactions in 2013, amounting to Dh70 billion in volume. The high point was when we successfully completed over two million transactions in a single day, with several instances of over 100 transactions per second.”

“The ever-increasing focus on customer centricity has meant that consumers are becoming empowered by the day, and payment models are constantly being tuned to the customer’s requirements by leveraging the latest technologies,” he added.

Trivedi pointed out that Network International had taken huge strides with regard to investing in next generation technologies including the launch of ‘Network One,’ an innovative and market-leading platform developed in partnership with OpenWay. A first of its kind in the region, the new platform allows innovative products to be created, or value added services like loyalty programmes and mobile payments to be implemented by monitoring the behavior and attributes of a payment.

Network International’s User Conference brings together financial institutions, public luminaries, business leaders, government utility providers and merchant partners of Network International.

— business@khaleejtimes.com