Mercury Payments democratises digital payments in the UAE with Oracle Cloud

By Leandra Monteiro

Mercury is using Oracle Banking Payments, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to help democratise digital payments in the UAE. With Oracle Banking Payments, Mercury was able to capitalize on changes in the digital payments landscape in the post-pandemic era to create their unique offering in the market. The offering was created to support the Instant Payment Platform for the UAE Central Bank National Payment Systems Strategy (NPSS).

“Mercury Payments Services was formed with a mission to democratize financial services. Our vision and strategy are to make payments completely safe, secure, and smart for all our stakeholders using the most advanced technologies,” said Nihad Nazir, chief digital and technology officer, Mercury Payments. “We sought to provide payment services to the UAE’s traditionally disenfranchised, unbanked populace. Now, we are expanding our solutions with a sophisticated Platform-as-a-service offering for banks and exchange houses that makes the most of Oracle’s banking expertise and Oracle’s cloud innovations in region, including their recent data center launch in Abu Dhabi.”

In addition to using a number of solutions in the Oracle Banking Payment Hub and OCI, Mercury also recently went live with Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in just 15 days. As Mercury evolves, it plans to continue its cloud-first application strategy.

“We are constantly adopting new technologies to fuel our unique business models that focus on maximizing digital transformation,” said Gururaj Balakrishna, Mercury Payments, Chief Risk Officer. “Our partnership with Oracle on Payments-as-a-Service, as part of the critical NPSS initiative, helps us achieve our objectives of offering customer centric digital solutions.”

“The pandemic became a forcing function to push people away from cash towards more digital, contactless payments both for safety and convenience – and consumers and businesses are never going back,” said Sonny Singh, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Financial Services. “Leveraging our proven payment solutions, together with the scalability, security, and performance of OCI, Mercury was able to quickly execute its vision of bringing digital payments to institutions and people across the UAE.”

Oracle Banking financial services applications enable banks to offer a complete set of digital banking services to customers. The portfolio includes the digital core and applications for retail and corporate banking, real-time payments, and digital experience. Built on a microservices architecture with 3,000-plus open banking APIs, Oracle Banking makes it easy for FinTechs like Mercury Payments to “plug in” additional Oracle and third-party services when they need them. It also provides a scalable, cloud environment for growth through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.