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ACI Worldwide Inc. announced early Monday it has signed a 10-year partnership with digital-payments technology provider Arab Financial Services.
The deal is expected to accelerate ACI’s push to help financial institutions and fintechs in the Middle East and Africa modernize their digital-payments technology infrastructure, according to ACI.
Under the terms of the agreement, Arab Financial Solutions will make ACI’s enterprise-payments and payments-orchestration platforms available to its bank owners and clients throughout the Middle East and Africa. Arab Financial Solutions is owned by 37 banks and financial institutions and serves more than 60 clients in more than 20 countries across the two regions.
ACI’s enterprise payments platform, said to be cloud-ready, supports processing of all payment types, as well as multiple currencies and languages across multiple financial institutions, the Miami-based company says. Cloud-ready applications have been designed and tested to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of cloud-computing infrastructure and services.
ACI’s payments-orchestration platform enables merchants to initiate payments using a single software set, platform, and application-programming interface integration.
ACI began working with AFS in 2018, and the two companies started offering a joint acquiring service three years later in Egypt. The partners launched an e-commerce offering in the region in 2022 with the introduction of a payments-orchestration platform from ACI. “The recent deal pulls everything together, enabling AFS to grow over the next 10 years without the burden of legacy technology,” an ACI spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News.
“ACI’s partnership with Arab Financial Services is an important milestone in our strategy to support banks and merchants in the Middle East in their quest for digital-payments modernization,” Santhosh Rao, senior vice president for the region at ACI, says in a statement. “AFS is now in a strong position to support all customers in the region on their quest for digital transformation and innovation, while enabling the resiliency and service quality required by next-generation payment systems.”
