Absa ARO moves to Fiserv for card management, processing

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Fiserv, the payments and financial services technology provider, has been chosen by Absa Regional Operations (ARO) to support credit card management and processing across nine nations in Africa.

As part of a program to help Absa ARO separate its card platform from Barclays PLC, Fiserv has helped the company take steps to remodel its business. This includes implementing increased agility and growth across its services in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Absa, which is one of the largest diversified financial services groups in the region, has implemented the managed service solution FirstVision to enable global processing economies of scale with integrated risk management and loyalty programs across the card-issuing lifecycle. Moreover, its architecture and open APIs facilitate application development.

FirstVision, which has a software-as-a-service model, reduces dependency on customized solutions, resulting in less operational risk and reduced operating costs with ‘pay-as-you-use’ pricing. It provides access to a world-class development roadmap, so new services such as Google Pay can be simply turned on, rather than bespoke developed, increased automation, flexibility, and granularity of products and parameters, and access to sophisticated tools including the Falcon fraud detection system and alignment to regulatory changes.

“Fiserv provided us with a flexible and scalable solution that meets local requirements across Africa, enabling us to achieve separation from Barclays PLC within our agreed timeline while preparing to support growing card usage in the region,” said Vimal Kumar, Chief Executive for Retail and Business Banking, ARO.

“The collaborative effort of our teams exceeded our expectations, and I look forward to our continued partnership. I am confident that our platform choice will enable us to fast track the digitalisation of our credit card business, which is key to building our customer franchise.”

Nicky Sheridan, Managing Director of Fiserv in Africa, said: “Absa has a passion for Africa and a commitment to digitising their business for customer success. We are proud to be their partner and to leverage our experience gained from supporting nearly 100 million cardholders across EMEA to enable their ongoing transformation.”