While the global economic downturn has impacted almost every corner of the planet, the growth in the Middle East payments market has predominantly continued at rapid pace, The Financial Markets Association said. New technology and business initiatives are still being sought by the major banks in the region, which continue to adopt cutting edge solutions in an attempt to drive consumers away from the traditional use of cash. This has been seen through the widespread interest and adoption of prepaid cards, and a real drive by banks to acquire a significant proportion of the un-banked population. For example, Saudi Arabia encourages organizations to look at the strength of their wholesale payment solutions. In the future, any organization with more than 100 employees will make salary payments through automated clearing house (ACH). The consequences of this initiative are far reaching and impact transaction volumes in a variety of banking systems. This not only drives further growth in the wholesale/corporate payment volumes, but has a knock-on effect in retail, as employees of larger SMEs will now have to withdraw cash from ATMs, or use debit products for purchases at point of sale (POS). Either way this will drive the use of electronic payments and provide significant growth. One negative impact of the global economic downturn has been the increase in card and account fraud in the region, which is now a massive cause for concern. As such, the financial institutions in the region are busy adopting anti fraud measures such as full roll out of EMV (a standard for interoperation of IC cards) chip cards. Additionally banks are seeking to compliment fraud prevention solutions such as EMV with sophisticated fraud monitoring and alerting tools which minimize the impact of this growing problem in the region.
