NIFT, Haball Collab On New Rail To Digitize B2B Payments In Pakistan

National Institutional Facilitation Technologies (NIFT) has announced a partnership with B2B FinTech Haball for a new contextual railroad to help boost B2B payments in Pakistan, according to a press release.

The mode of payments has long been lacking in the country, the release from Haball stated, and NIFT and Haball will combine their services into a new platform, NIFT ePay, which will help digitize the supply chains in modern ways.

The combination will achieve that goal through a Contextual Funds Transfer (CFT) payment rail, connected to the businesses’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chains, which would ultimately create interoperability for business payments and more visibility.

The press release stated that Pakistan has made strides in digitizing payments, but not so much for the specific category of B2B payments — which have long been more difficult than P2P services like Venmo where one can send or receive money as an individual almost instantly.

On the contrary, B2B payments have issues such as large transaction values, complex supply chain decisions and authorization mechanisms, and context behind payments and reconciliation.

And while some banks might offer more digital options for corporate clients, those solutions are often closed-loop, limiting the operability between banks. Instead, businesses have to go through multiple banks and use more resources to settle payments, which ends up wasting time and money.

NIFT ePay, though, will allow more interoperability and also provide a new level of transparency, with confirmations between the payer and payee of every step of the payment. Based on the ISO 20022 framework, the CFT will provide detail on transactions, the press release stated.

Haball’s unified experience platform, in addition, will give banks more resources to meet clients’ needs beyond their own infrastructure.

NIFT CEO Haider Wahab, speaking at the signing ceremony, said he saw “great potential” in digitizing payments. He said the new solution would work to “resolve the limitations of business payment.”

Haball CEO Omer Bin Ahsan said the programs would provide all key stakeholders “a single, context rich experience.”