National Institutional Facilitation Technologies (NIFT) (an existing Payment System Operator/Provider (PSO/PSP) offering nation-wide cheque clearing services) and Haball (a B2B FinTech and Corporate Aggregator) sign an Institutional Aggregation Agreement for enabling B2B payments through NIFT’s Digital Financial Services platform under the brand name “NIFT ePay”. The strategic agreement is aimed to promote digitization of B2B and Supply Chain payments through a contextual railroad designed for B2B payments that is deeply integrated with businesses’ ERP / Supply Chain platforms and offers capturing of complete context throughout various stages in B2B payments lifecycle while creating interoperability for business payments.
Since the last decade, great focus has been made by the financial industry in Pakistan for digitization of payments, however, majority of the efforts revolve around consumer payments. B2B payments have largely been neglected due to inherent challenges posed by such payments including large transaction values, urgency in realization to trigger supply chain decisions, complicated authorization mechanisms, context behind payments and reconciliation etc.
Some banks offer digital payment facilitation for their corporate clients, but the solution offered is largely closed-loop / branch intensive with some limited transactions across banks which hinders interoperability of business payments through these platforms. Due to a lack of interoperability and the inability of current solutions to capture the context behind business payment, businesses use large operational teams to reconcile their payments across multiple collecting banks which costs them time and money.
NIFT has worked with its technology partner TPS and strategic aggregator Haball to design a “Contextual Funds Transfer (CFT)” railroad which not only allows interoperable payments between multiple business accounts, but also provides real-time confirmations to both the payer and the payee of the payment and its context enabling real-time reconciliation. In addition to the CFT railroad, Haball’s Unified experience platform provides a complete payment solution to businesses and facilitates banks to fulfill the transactional needs of the corporate clients beyond their own infrastructure. CFT is based on the
ISO 20022 framework and provides immense depth of detail within the payment transaction for the benefit of the corporates using the facility hence enabling capturing of complete context behind a business payment.
NIFT has already started working with multiple banks during the ideation and development phase of the project and is now technically ready to start integrating the banks and corporates for enabling the market on this payment railroad.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Mr. Haider Wahab said, “We understand that it’s not an easy journey but good things take time, effort and persistence but they also go a long way. NIFT has been known to serve the financial industry for over two decades with a promise of consistent and robust services. We see a great potential in B2B payment digitization and we are happy to work with a partner like Haball, which focuses and is aggressively working to digitize complexity and diversity in domestic supply chains. The teams have worked together to create an exciting payment and collection solution, focused to resolve the limitations of business payment. I believe that this will change the way business payments are being done today.”
Mr. Omer Bin Ahsan, CEO Haball speaking at the signing said “Contextual Fund Transfer aggregated by Haball’s Digital Supply Chain Platform provides all key stakeholders, from the corporate, their distributors and retailers, a single, context rich experience, tightly coupled with a highly secure payment mechanism. Haball with NIFTs new and all-encompassing B2B payments rail is poised to simplify and change the way how businesses, of all sizes, pay each other ”
