Procco in Bahrain Selects WAY4 to Implement its Sharia Compliant Retail Financing Programm
Procco Financial Services selects WAY4 to implement its Sharia-compliant multi-functional retail financing system for new EMV instalment card issuing and acquiring business
Procco Financial Services, established by The International Investor, and OpenWay, an international developer and vendor of new-generation payment processing solutions, are happy to announce that Procco has selected OpenWay's WAY4 product and transaction framework to build its new multi-functional retail financing system.
Procco Financial Services has been established in Bahrain by The International Investor (TII), a leading financial shareholding company in Kuwait. Licensed by the Bahrain Monetary Agency, Procco will provide a full range of Sharia-compliant services and transaction processing, both to TII companies and to others wanting dedicated Sharia- compliant ‘back offices’ supporting their financial products. Procco services are based on a Service Oriented Architecture technology platform and services undertaken include contract and product management, transaction processing, call centre, risk management, application and data control, and finance and administration functions.
According to the agreement between Procco and OpenWay, OpenWay's WAY4 software will provide Procco with EMV-compliant chip card issuing and acquiring, product and transaction management, accounting, multi-branch management, terminal network management, and integration with Procco's IT infrastructure. In addition, WAY4 enables Procco to issue and acquire EMV-compliant branded private label and merchant-branded cards.
Furthermore, WAY4 enables Procco to design and manage comprehensive server-based loyalty programmes, based on OpenWay's "behaviour loyalty" concept and supports multi-application cards with Sharia-compliant instalment and purchasing applications. Sharia compliance means that Procco products and services conform to Islamic law. For example, no interest is charged on retail transactions, goods or services must be acceptable under Islam, and high risk or uncertainty is avoided. Under Sharia-compliant instalment plans, consumers pay fixed service fees for certain time periods allowed for them to purchase acceptable goods.
John Dolton, a Senior Partner at TII and CEO of Procco, commented on the signing of the agreement: "The first card-based financial products to be supported by Procco will be unique and truly Sharia compliant and leading in the use of Chip and PIN technology. This required a partner and provider whose software could provide greater flexibility and scalability than normally available, and this needed to be attained with minimum effort which is just what the WAY4 OLTP framework offered."
WAY4's flexibility ensures that the system can be easily adapted to various customer requirements. The system is highly parameterised, which allows banks to create a great variety of products and services and manage processes effectively. It also translates into less time-to-market and a reduced total cost of ownership. To protect bank investments, WAY4 provides comprehensive means for real-time risk management. The system's productivity allows for processing more than 10 million products on a unified platform, while the module architecture ensures the system's scalability, which may influence both productivity and the number of functions.
According to Kamran Khan, COO, OpenWay Middle East: "In this project, we face Sharia requirements in the banking business and must implement them according to Procco's unique business approach. The fast-expanding Middle East market has great potential for us as a vendor of solutions for fast developing large-scale financial businesses and implementing innovative programmes, and we are happy to see the market's interest in the WAY4 system."
Procco Financial Services
Procco Financial Services has been established in Bahrain by The International Investor (TII), a leading financial shareholding company in Kuwait. Licensed by the Bahrain Monetary Agency, Procco provides a full range of Sharia-compliant services and transaction processing, both to TII companies and to others wanting dedicated Sharia- compliant ‘back offices’ supporting their financial products. Procco services are based on a Service Oriented Architecture technology platform and its offering includes contract and product management, transaction processing, call centre, risk management, application and data control as well as finance and administration functions. "Customer satisfaction is a top priority for us and we are committed to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our customer service operations," said Bénard Wiese, Project Manager at Procco. "After a very comprehensive search for a solution provider, we partnered with Altitude Software because of the company's expertise in solving demanding, Sharia-compliant contact centre requirements.