ISLAMABAD – State Bank of Pakistan approved first ever National e commercepayment gateway.
The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has recently granted approval forcommencement of pilot operations of NIFT’s (National InstitutionalFacilitation Technologies) e-Commerce Payment Gateway called “NIFT ePay”.
This makes NIFT, the first domestic and account-based “e-Commerce PaymentGateway” to get an approval for the pilot launch under the PSO/PSP rules.
NIFT ePay’s primary focus is to execute interoperable and secure digitalcommerce payments in Pakistan using details of bank account or wallet. Thisprovides an opportunity for the customers who don’t have conventionalinstruments for digital payments such as Debit or Credit Card to conducte-commerce transactions directly through their transactional accounts andwallets.
These customers may maintain their account/wallets with any memberfinancial institutions connected to NIFT ePay which gives these financialinstitutions an opportunity to offer an interoperable digital paymentsplatform for all their collection mandates through an account-based localpayment gateway.
NIFT is an existing Payment System Operator/Provider (PSO/PSP) offeringnation-wide cheque clearing services to financial organizations acrossPakistan.
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NIFT has been providing consistent services to the financial industry overthe past two decades and it’s now creating reliable, secure, andinteroperable payments systems that enable different digital payments usecases in Pakistan.
For this purpose, NIFT ePay envisions to enhance its gateway to digitizepayments for corporates and governments through its “Contextual FundsTransfer (CFT)” and create interoperability for many other use-cases, whilealigning itself with the ‘Digital Pakistan’ program by Government ofPakistan and the ‘National Payment Systems Strategy’ and ‘MPG’ initiativesbeing undertaken by State Bank of Pakistan.
NIFT has collaborated with TPS for implementing the NIFT ePay’s completetechnology stack. TPS is a leading payments technology company fosteringthe financial technology ecosystem in the country for acceleratinginnovation in the financial service landscape.
NIFT ePay’s launch is the first step towards creating an inclusiveenvironment which will not only offer fully agnostic aggregation of digitalpayments methods but will also provide a secure and open access tostart-ups, fintechs, retailers, large scale corporates, SMEs and GovernmentInstitutions to digitize their collections use-case, disrupting the digitalfinancial services play in the country.
