Arab Financial Services (AFS), a Bahrain-based digital payment solutions fintech, has announced its partnership with Singapore-based fintech, Brankas, to provide contemporary open finance infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The collaboration will allow AFS to offer essential financial services such as credit scoring, payroll disbursements, account-to-account payments, and account services to its clients, and open up new bank account openings. The APIs that will be made available through AFS’ platform are critical in allowing tech platforms to offer these services.
AFS’ CEO, Samer Soliman, believes the integration with Brankas’ infrastructure is a “natural step” in the company’s expansion and innovation. “Our vision is to empower our clients to deliver relevant and customer-centric products that positively impact the lives of customers,” he adds. AFS intends to use Brankas’ open finance expertise to increase financial inclusion in countries such as Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Brankas’ CEO and co-founder, Todd Schweitzer, expressed his excitement about the opportunity to work with AFS to hone the company’s open finance expertise in a new market with its own regulatory bodies. He believes Bahrain is leading the charge in the region to drive the holistic adoption of open finance, and Brankas looks forward to working with the visionaries in the country to improve the availability and quality of financial services for the everyday person.
The partnership with Brankas represents AFS’ latest move in expanding its embedded finance solutions and open finance practices to the MENA region. The Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) introduced the Bahrain open banking framework (OBF) in 2020 as a way to facilitate the implementation of open banking services across the kingdom and the wider MENA region. The OBF includes detailed operational guidelines, security standards and guidelines, customer experience guidelines, technical open API specifications, and the overall governance framework needed to protect customer data. Brankas aims to establish a global open finance network following its 2022 partnerships with Visa, CRIF, and McKenzie. The fintech, founded in 2016, works with over 90 customers to provide embedded finance solutions that increase financial inclusion globally.
