Selcom and NMB Bank: Interoperability at its finest!
Launched in 2018, Selcom Pay was the first merchant payment solution to enable customers to pay for goods and services using QR code or merchant till numbers. Through its GTM partnership with Mastercard, Selcom Pay became the only merchant payment solution to work with over thirty banks and all six incumbent mobile wallet providers. The Selcom Mastercard app for Android and iOS further allows card holders to enjoy the convenience of QR scanning to make payments seamlessly at over 50,000 merchant locations across Tanzania. The Selcom platform enables merchants to collect payments electronically using its deep integration APIs that are both issuer and settlement channel agnostic and support ecommerce merchants too.
Towards the end of 2020, Selcom and NMB Bank finalised a strategic partnership to enable NMB Mkononi customers to pay at Selcom Pay merchants and for Selcom-enabled issuer channel customers to pay at NMB QR merchants to foster direct, local interoperability. This adds NMB Bank to our growing list of banks and goes a step further in bringing cost efficiencies to the processing, clearing and settlement process. Merchant payments have been growing exponentially over the past few years and the savings realized through this partnership will be passed on to merchants to encourage higher participation.
The Tanzanian market boasts several merchant payment options that have historically been designed individually by mobile money operators and/or banks with a view to own as much of the value chain as possible, including both the customer and merchant. Selcom, as the largest payment service provider (PSP), set out to address this problem with a single-minded mission to expedite the adoption of digital acceptance at this level and consolidate the fragmented digital payment space. In 2018, Selcom Pay, a truly open-loop merchant payment solution, was designed to digitize payments from every available channel, without the need for merchants to jump hoops to manage multiple issuers, reconciliation, integration, notifications or settlement, not to mention the tediously frustrating onboarding process merchants endured to connect and integrate with issuer channels.
Selcom initially worked with banks and mobile wallets to design this on USSD, followed by the launch of the much-awaited Selcom Mastercard app to allow scanning of QR codes. The app later added bill payments and Selcom’s highly popular cashback loyalty program, Qwikrewards.
“Traditionally, merchant acquiring has been limited to top tier banks that have direct principal or group affiliated scheme memberships. While card penetration has been generally low, card acquiring has come under even more pressure due to mobile payments originating from bank accounts and wallets, while also delinking the segment from POS hardware as a cost barrier to participation. The advent of QR payments meant that critical stakeholders such as the schemes, needed to step away from their traditional operating model to scale in Africa, and this is where Selcom came into the picture. A merchant does not want to manage countless portals and accounts to accept payments from multiple customer-facing digital channels, and thus the consolidated Selcom Pay offering was designed to adapt to the local market needs. We are also the only acquirer in this market that offers merchants both standard and bespoke deep integration capabilities through our APIs to connect to complex ERPs or business systems - something that is not normally possible with other service providers.”
The Selcom-NMB partnership comes at an opportune time when costs have to be kept low, and systems have to communicate more frequently than usual to help merchants grow their digital ecosystems. Given that both players are working with the same consumers, this interoperability is the logical next step within the merchant payments space in Tanzania. Selcom looks forward to working closely with NMB and hopes the next few months will see more bank partners coming onboard.
“Our partnership with Selcom will not only create convenience for our NMB Mkononi users, but rather open doors to offer interoperable solutions to over 4 Million NMB customers. NMB Bank is positioned as the best digital & innovative bank in Tanzania given the number of customers we have. The growth of merchants has an impact on the MNO penetration into the acquiring space directly influencing how people pay for goods and services where mobile phone adoption keeps going on the rise.”