Banking-as-a-service platform (BaaS) Neem has introduced a payment infrastructure for digital businesses in Pakistan.
“Our goal is to address the existing financial wellness gap in Pakistan, and we are doing so by enabling digital businesses to leverage the power of embedded finance,” Nadeem Shaikh, co-founder of Neem, said on the company blog Monday (Sept. 25).
“Neem’s payments infrastructure helps businesses and platforms expand their presence into underserved communities, create new revenue streams around financial services, and lower their operational expenses. It’s all about banking with one platform,” he added.
According to the blog post, Pakistan’s economy is in the midst of “widespread digitalization” as consumers embrace digital products and financial services.
“Nonetheless, the fragmented payment systems continue to pose significant challenges for digital businesses in Pakistan,” the company said. “These systems hinder their growth and cause issues with delayed revenue collections and costly operational inefficiencies. As a Banking-as-a-Service platform, we are dedicated to resolving these challenges at the infrastructure level.”
According to Neem, the offering lets digital businesses create or link bank accounts for their customers with Neem’s application programming interfaces (APIs). There’s also a payment gateway to allow for secure and efficient payments, and a card-issuing API that lets businesses offer physical, virtual and co-branded debit cards to customers directly from their platform.
As PYMNTS noted earlier this year, BaaS is what makes embedded finance possible. It’s a fee-based model that lets non-financial companies offer financial services to their end users by connecting directly to banks’ systems via APIs.
“This connection enables third parties to leverage banks’ licenses to build banking products and services, which they can then offer to users or sell as white-label solutions to other companies,” PYMNTS wrote in April.
By using APIs, BaaS platforms offer the necessary infrastructure for companies to become financial service providers in a quick, cost-effective way. This system benefits everyone involved, from the banks to the businesses to consumers.
PYMNTS also spoke earlier this year with Jeff Nowicki, vice president of banking at Treasury Prime, who projected that BaaS will grow as this year unfolds.
“Nowicki said he believes that much of this growth will stem from enterprises leveraging BaaS to create and provide checking accounts and business accounts in a variety of nonfinancial channels, from consumer-facing interactions to back-office systems,” that report said.
He also argued that this year will also bring regulatory clarity in the sector, as regulators look to establish clear oversight over data sharing and the types of financial services engendered by BaaS and embedded finance.
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