AFS - Arab Financial Services

Arab Financial Services (AFS), the region’s leading payment solutions provider and FinTech enabler, has expanded its contact center offering providing a tailored service for Decimal Factor, a UK-based aggregator that is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The dedicated contact center will cater to the Middle East & EMEA region, UK & USA markets, from Bahrain, and will comprise over 100 employees by the first quarter of 2020.

This expands on AFS’ existing contact center solutions, from its conventional 24/7 inbound contact center activities, to an outbound telemarketing set-up covering customers outside the Middle East. AFS currently operates contact centers in Bahrain and Oman for banks, financial institutions and insurance providers across the region. AFS’ contact center offering consistently provides exceptional customer experiences, efficient service, first call resolutions and consolidation of customer information that ensures sophisticated service request routing to resolve issues and respond to queries more efficiently.

Speaking of the partnership with Decimal Factor, Mr. B Chandrasekhar AFS CEO said: “This partnership will see us expand our distinctive contact center offering. Bahrain offers a host of benefits that make it appealing for corporates to host a contact center in the Kingdom, from state-of-the-art technology to a capable workforce. This contact center will create greater employment opportunities for Bahrainis, and we are committed to building larger talent pools in the Kingdom and providing them with comprehensive training and development to upskill our workforce with the competencies required to enhance customer support and satisfaction.”

Aligned with AFS’ Fintech activities, Decimal Factor operates on Artificial Intelligence, harnessing data through data science, open-banking-enabled data capture to create a digital journey through portals, apps, API’s and POS devices and via merchant management tools.

Mr. Manoj Karkhanis, CEO, Decimal Factor said: “I am very excited about our recently launched Global Centre of Excellence (GCOE) at AFS. This GCOE will be our Back Office and Support Hub to acquire new customers digitally and use conventional channels in UK, USA, Middle East & EMEA region. We believe Bahrain is the perfect location for such an initiative, given the wealth of resources already in the Kingdom. Our workforce talent gives us an edge in this competitive arena to cater to various markets globally and with this in mind we look forward to a successful Decimal Factor hub at AFS Bahrain.”

With more than 30 years of experience, AFS serves over 75 clients across the financial sector in more than 20 countries. AFS is owned by 37 banks and financial institutions and regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain. The company offers innovative and end-to-end payment services and solutions that span card processing, merchant acquiring, Fintech and a state-of-the-art value-added services suite. AFS has introduced significantly disruptive and cutting-edge Fintech solutions in recent years: In 2018, AFS introduced bwallet to the region - the first mobile wallet facilitating peer-to-peer and cashless transactions. Today, bwallet has established itself as the market leader with a significant user and merchant footprint across the Kingdom of Bahrain. EasyPay was another first from AFS - Bahrain’s first NFC payment service allowing payments with a tap of the mobile. Other innovations rolled out by AFS have been electronic KYC, Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Peer-to-Merchant (P2M), QR enabled payments, Tokenization, Remittance, WPS and Digital Banking solutions.