A Growing Network

Sandeep Chouhan Group Chief Business Transformation and Technology Officer at Network International identifies the factors behind their recent growth, what is driving their prospects in Africa, the positive affects standardisation has in the payments markets and how they remain a regional leader in their competitive field

What do you think has been behind the increases in 2022 that Network International experienced over the previous year?

Network International has been a digital leader in payments for many years across the Middle East and Africa. In 2022, we saw the introduction of new stores of value in our acquiring businesses both in the Middle East and across most of Africa. The arrival of mobile money completely changed the landscape through which we were bringing solutions to our consumers.

The arrival of APIs and Open Banking has allowed us to accelerate the transformation that our clients, and over 200 banks that we serve across the region have seen, allowing a rapid increase in their ability to participate in a payments ecosystem. These things have really brought new experiences and are inviting many more companies, disruptors and payment disruptors to come in, such as the telecommunications people, the retailers, transportation providers, healthcare providers; everybody seems to be jumping in and wanting to offer a payment product.

The sophistication and the evolution of digital wallets has been another reason that we are seeing an unusual growth in the payment space, particularly for us. Our stack is a very modern stack that is completely cloud ready and we already offer our services in multiple clouds. Our payments have API-led capabilities, which allows us to offer open finance and to support all these features too. And with the ability to build a tokenised payments rails system, it means that we are accelerating the digital agenda of our clients. We are able to bring very extensive analytics and rich insights into the payments capabilities to our clients, which is very highly valued. Additionally, our ability to bring in deep AI tools that are driving much better management of fraud, compliance, credit and loyalty, allows us to really accelerate the complexity of our offering in a very sophisticated way. So, these have been big game changers through 2020 and we believe that we are going to continue to make investments in keeping our platforms modern as we go through the coming years.

While the bulk of your business stems from your Middle East segment, do you expect to see Africa taking a bigger proportion in the coming years?

Africa is showing a much higher rate of growth, particularly as the payments infrastructure is going through a complete transformation on the back of technology and particularly the use of mobile money capabilities. This is really changing the consumer behavior of both the banked and the unbanked population. And as you know, Africa has such a large unbanked population that is now entering the mainstream of payments. The convenience that mobile money offers and the reach that mobile infrastructure is offering, means that the growth rates are outstripping any other part of the world at the moment. We at Network International are already a very strong presence across forty-two countries in Africa and we feel we are best positioned to benefit from that growth in the economy.

How do you expect the international payments landscape to be impacted by the implementation of ISO20022?

Standardisation through the efforts of ISO always brings harmony into an ecosystem. As innovation is coming, people are being pulled in various directions, but standardisation brings the ease of interoperability. So as a central provider of payment services, standardisation means local FinTechs and local payment schemes will be able to interoperate in a much more seamless manner, giving a much better experience to customers, much more ease for regulators to manage the environments and allow for processors like us to serve and deliver a great customer experience. So, bringing frictionless experiences to customers is always a critical part of what we do every day.

How does Network International stay at the head of the fast-developing payments marketplace?

Payments remains the most innovative sector within the financial services world. And the investments that are being made into the Pay-tech sector is allowing for a completely new technological infrastructure which is moving away from messaging to tokenisation and building new railroads using blockchain based technologies.

The FinTechs out there, and the banks are solving issues and working for the development of a new range of innovative solutions that were not previously possible. The arrival of Open Finance and APIs means the movement of data has become a lot more intense and the sharing of data has become a lot more simpler and quicker. And the arrival of the Cloud means all of this can be done at a much faster pace. And with the availability of hypercompute capabilities, you are allowing to just power the engine for innovation and thereby growth in this sector.

How has the acquisition of DPO improved or changed Network International’s business?

DPO is a very successful e-commerce business and they have a very strong presence across Africa. For Network, it has brought capabilities of a very sophisticated offering to our e-commerce merchants, to our ability to participate with gateways and payment aggregators and has brought us an access to a customer reach across 30 countries in Africa, and particularly the enterprise customer segments which are really seeing a very fast pace of growth. And these are enterprises that are innovating themselves very rapidly and transforming themselves very, very quickly.

So, to be able to partner in that ecosystem, to move at that pace with agility, and creating really new stores of value has been a game changer for us. So, we see that the DPO learnings to be brought into our other markets will continue to enrich our capability and offerings.