Mo Ali Yusuf, the VP at Checkout.com for the MENA and Asia Pacific Region, says he’s looking forward to teaming up with NiFT and the Fintech ecosystem in Pakistan in order to support the growth of digital commerce and virtual payments in the country.

Pakistan’s National e-Commerce Council (NeCC) confirmed on September 24, 2020, that they had approved the joint initiative launched by the National Institutional Facilitation Technologies (Nift) and Checkout.com. The project focuses on bringing more international payment methods to Pakistan, where most global payment methods like PayPal are still not available.

Nift, an established Pakistan based transactional clearing facilitator, had committed to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with UK-based Checkout.com, a Fintech firm that provides payments solutions in over 150 different currencies, in-country acquiring services, reporting features, and filters that can identify potential fraudulent transactions.

The goal of the implementation is to allow both organizations to offer digital payment services via each other’s infrastructure while working cooperatively on various commercial projects in Pakistan.

As first reported by Dawn News, the NeCC is led by Commerce Advisor Abdul Razak Dawood. The organization has reportedly looked into the implementation of several different measures such as taxing activities involving digital commerce and logistics facilities.

Checkout can take digital payments from various international card schemes or providers, such as Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Union Pay. It can also accept payments from widely-used alternative and local service providers. Checkout aims to offer a seamless and unified payments processing service that also supports AliPay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal.

The NeCC is a body of representatives from Pakistan’s public and private sectors. It has been established with support and guidance from the National e-Commerce Policy of Pakistan. The NeCC aims to promote effective collaboration between the nation’s public and private sectors so that they can develop appropriate e-commerce policies.

An MoU has been signed between Pakistan Software Exporters Association and the Chain Store Association of Pakistan in order to support local SMEs by helping them adopt digital technologies (and other modern services) so that they can streamline their operations.