Visa and NymCard Collaborate on Payment Credentials Issuance

NymCard, a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) firm that serves the Middle East and Pakistan, has joined the Visa Ready to Launch (VRTL) program.

The VRTL program aims to simplify the process of issuing payment products for FinTech and non-banking organizations, and NymCard’s plug-and-play platform will help FinTech companies in the region transform their payment credential issuance capabilities, the firms said in a Monday (Aug. 28) press release.

Launching new payment programs can be a complex task for FinTech and non-banking entities, as the card enablement landscape remains fragmented, according to the release. To address this challenge, the VRTL program provides an end-to-end credentials issuance capability, including product bundling, program management and a scalable tech integration platform through application programming interfaces (APIs).

“Visa Ready to Launch is the first of its kind plug-and-play end-to-end issuance platform which effectively bundles products and services for FinTechs to swiftly and seamlessly launch a payment program,” Salima Gutieva, vice president and UAE country manager at Visa, said in the release.

Omar Onsi, CEO and founder of NymCard, added: “We are excited to be able to use our expertise and our modern payments platform to scale up the onboarding of Visa’s Ready to Launch program. And we are honored to be chosen as the first processor to do so.”

The FinTech enablement program is initially available in the Gulf Cooperation Council and North Africa, Levant and Pakistan regions, with plans to expand to Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the press release. NymCard is the pioneer in joining the program, and more processors are expected to follow suit.

This partnership comes about two months after NymCard acquired buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm Spotii in June in a move that enables it to offers its financial services clients a BNPL tool customized for local markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The integrated platform will serve both the B2C and B2B markets while also offering features like eKYC (know your customer), machine learning (ML)-powered rules, a fully configurable loan management system and an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven collections app, NymCard said at the time.

About eight months before that, in October, NymCard partnered with cross-border money transfer firm Western Union to expand international money transfer services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).