24 October 2017
This industry-driven “Oscar award” is given by the Emerging Payments Awards to the best innovations and projects for the year. With the help of Tieto Retail Payments and Cards’ payments solution, Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) has been able to develop National Instant Payment switch for the 30 member banks, becoming the first real-time interbank transaction platform in the East-Africa region.
Tieto has been one of the major drivers worldwide to advance digital economies, digital payments customer experience and financial inclusion. Since early 2010, Tieto has been advising on the benefits of the digital retail payments and their evolution to a wider range of Kenya banking environment players and also shared its experience in other countries, where Tieto participated in building national level infrastructure projects in payments industry.
In 2014, after delivering the best value proposition and confirming experience and best technology proposition, Tieto was selected by KBA for the implementation of the national payments system switch to enable PesaLink instant payments 24/7. This is a landmark project for Kenya but also for wider region of eastern Africa, since it allows development of the digitally elevated payments to drive financial inclusion and wider interoperability between parties in financial services. This project is also clear evidence of how nationwide initiatives may generate large value for society and speed up growth of the economy via cash-lite society.
Understanding the customer's business is essential for success
Close and very professional cooperation with the customer on all levels is the key for successful cooperation. “Tieto must understand customers' business to ensure high quality service. Frequent face-to-face meetings between both teams help a lot in building relationship and understanding the tough business environment the customer is actually facing every day”, Inga Soboleva, Account manager, explains.
“I could not be more proud of this achievement! Great team, great project, great platform to build future financial services in Kenya! And more importantly, Tieto has proven that instant payments are really a breakthrough value proposition on the whole country level. They are changing how people use and gain benefit from financial services, how the inclusion of people is happening, and how much more innovation can be driven by such government level financial inclusion initiatives”, says Valdis Janovs, Head of Retail payments and cards, Financial Services.
Going forward, KBA and Tieto are seeing business opportunities in areas of person-to-business payment segment.
Read more about the Emerging Payments Awards