NIFT launches Pakistan’s interoperable e-Payment Gateway ‘NIFT ePay’

KARACHI: National Institutional Facilitation Technologies (NIFT) in collaboration with its business and technology partner TPS Worldwideannounces the launch of “NIFT ePay”, Pakistan’s all-inclusive and agnostic payment gateway which provides business solutions beyond payments.

NIFT ePay enables ecommerce payments by aggregating all payment instruments available in Pakistan including accounts, wallets and cards for customers to pay their e-commerce purchases or against their business invoices digitally, securely and conveniently and with the method of their preference through an ever growing network of merchants, businesses, participating banks and other financial institutions. Today ePay has already signed up all the major financial institutions and has enabled their customers to make payments conveniently to a variety of use cases in a secure and reliable manner. NIFT ePay is already living up to its promise to disrupt the digital payment landscape of Pakistan into a new era of digital payments with a smooth payment experience and becoming the largest aggregator of bank accounts.

With 35 percent growth in ecommerce in the first quarter of 2021 compared to same quarter last year, the need of robust, scalable and open digital payments infrastructure has never been this important. The need to make payments faster, cheaper and conveniently is no more a luxury but a necessity in the fast paced world and has become more glaring in recent times, due to the current situation of Covid-19. This situation has amplified the need for digital payments to be designed to capture the market needs of being agnostic (i.e. having alternative delivery channels), interoperable (i.e. ability to exchange transaction from one financial institution to different financial institutions), contextual (i.e. captures “context” behind any transactions such as purpose of payment, invoice number, sales tax and other key details) and secure.

NIFT ePay acknowledges that lack of trust of the e-commerce buyers is amongst the top factors behind cash on delivery being the preferred payment method. NIFT ePay aims to expand its solutions offering to also provide an effective dispute resolution and consumer protection system that fosters the digital payments and ecommerce growth in Pakistan.

According to Fawad Abdul Kader, who heads Digital Financial Services at NIFT, “NIFT ePay is an agnostic platform that provides the maximum number of retail and business customers the ability to make payments digitally at merchants using any payment instrument they use in a secure manner. The idea is to enable people make ecommerce payments using different payment instruments like transactional accounts, debit and credit cards, wallets both local and international to harness the actual potential of digital commerce payments in Pakistan. We are providing railroads that capture context and enable the market to digitize not only payment from consumers to businesses but also business to business payments. We believe that this will also support collection of government payments from both consumers and businesses as well. However, the journey of innovation from the NIFT ePay platform is just beginning and the promise of providing service beyond payments is core to our strategy, watch out for the different services NIFT ePay brings to the market in the next few months.”

NIFT ePay is developed in partnership with TPS having its digital payments technology being at the core of the digital commerce platform. NIFT and TPS entered into a landmark strategic partnership almost three years back to create this platform.

Shahzad Shahid - CEO TPS commented on the technology of NIFT ePay Platform, “NIFT ePay is a success story of two local, successful companies coming together for disrupting the ecommerce landscape of Pakistan. Getting the commercial approval is a big milestone in the journey towards Cashless Pakistan. NIFT ePayh as a true potential to help the country realize its dream of Digital Pakistan and to support the SBP in its national payment systems strategy success and digital financial inclusion. ePay is developed on TPS IRIS Payment Gateway solution that today is the engine behind multiple innovative payment gateways in and outside Pakistan. Based on Iris payment switch which has a performance benchmark of over 18,000 transactions per second and compliant to PA-DSS for security, the software has been customized for NIFT ePay for its specific and endless use cases in payments. NIFT ePay provides modern rails for the digital financial services eco-system players in the country to process context based interoperable P2G, C2B and B2B payments directly utilizing the alternative payment methods including bank accounts, mobile wallets and other digital payment instruments of customer choice. ePay with its current solution and the future roadmap will enable every Pakistani business and individual to sell and buy confidently, digitally, remotely, securely and conveniently.”

Speaking on this milestone, Haider Wahab, CEO NIFT remarked, “NIFT ePay’s launch is a very special milestone for NIFT and is personally very close to my heart. We acknowledge the collaboration with our technology partner “TPS” for their untiring support and efforts for this achievement. I would also like to extend our sincere gratitude to SBP for their continuous guidance and support for NIFT ePay making this possible. We are very lucky to have a very forward looking and enabling regulator whose initiatives like RDA and Raast are changing the financial and payment landscape of the country. I would also take this opportunity to thank all our banking and institutional partners for their continuous trust and support for the initiative.

We look forward to play our role in the evolution of digital payments and their uptake in Pakistan with all the member banks, marketplaces, merchant /institutional aggregators, Institutions.” —PR

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021