ADQ-backed Wio Bank, Paymentology partner to enhance SME banking

ADQ-backed Wio Bank has joined hands with Paymentology, an issuer-processor, to enhance the neobank’s innovative banking model with customer-centric card payment services.

The partnership is aimed at removing friction for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), entrepreneurs and freelancers and allows them to open business accounts instantly and avoid long wait times while empowering them to utilise the service almost immediately with both physical and virtual cards.

The neobank is leveraging Paymentology’s in-cloud payment card issuing platform and data analytics capabilities to launch financial products fast and at scale as it empowers businesses and consumers with the latest digital banking solutions.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with Paymentology, as they share our vision to support small and medium-sized businesses – a vital economic segment in the UAE. This partnership will enable us to offer a comprehensive range of payment card services to Wio Business customers and gain valuable insights to better serve their needs,” said Jayesh Patel, CEO of Wio Bank.

The global issuer-processor is instrumental in enhancing the offerings of Wio Business, Wio Bank’s first digital banking application tailored to SMEs. Wio Business provides simplified and fully digital financial services such as issuing physical and virtual cards for SMEs – a segment that has historically relied on brick-and-mortar branches to open accounts and conduct business transactions.

Paymentology delivers a real-time data feed that provides granular customer spending insights to help Wio Bank continually improve its proposition. The company facilitates a wide range of card services for Wio Business including Visa debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and card personalisation services.

The partnership between Wio Bank and Paymentology comes as the UAE financial services sector continues to undergo rapid transformation driven by increasing consumer demand for digital products and services.

A study that was conducted by Visa revealed that accepting new forms of payments is fundamental to the growth of small and micro businesses.

Wio Bank supports SMEs

Meanwhile, Wio, which calls itself a “platform bank”, officially launched last September and has three main business lines: digital banking apps, embedded finance and banking-as-a-service—the provision of banking through third-party distributors.

The digital bank’s first digital banking application, Wio Business, is designed to provide startups, freelancers and SMEs with seamless access to banking services while allowing them to move forward with innovative beyond-banking services.

Read: Flat6Labs, Wio Bank ink MoU to enhance SME-centric banking services in Abu Dhabi

Wio Business provides simplified and fully digital business account opening, personalised options for banking services, and supplementary services and easy-to-use banking tools to support SMEs with better business management.

The neobank partnered with Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) in November 2022 to bolster collective efforts to support SMEs in the UAE to gain access to key banking services quickly and efficiently.

Read: UAE’s ADQ, Alpha Dhabi, Etisalat and FAB to launch next-gen banking platform

The partnership between Wio and ADGM offers SMEs in the UAE an opportunity to open a zero-balance account instantly with a free debit card and cheque book, virtual debit cards and invoicing features.

Wio partnered with Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, to allow SMEs to access the power of e-commerce faster and more conveniently. Through this partnership, Wio Business will empower SMEs and freelancers who previously struggled to access payment products to enter e-commerce faster with an easy-to-create Stripe account.

The bank also signed an MoU with Flat6Labs, the seed-stage programme and early-stage venture capital firm, to enhance banking services for startups in Abu Dhabi.

Earlier in January, the neobank partnered with First Abu Dhabi Bank to offer business customers cash and cheque facilities through the bank’s established ATM and CDM network.