A Middle Eastern and Central Asian digital lending platform for e-commerce, ZoodPay, announced a partnership with Mastercard on Monday to launch a prepaid virtual installment card in the Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.
According to a statement, the collaboration aims to “help expand financial and digital inclusion, benefiting the underbanked population and those with no credit data or limited access to finance. The introduction of the virtual installment card will allow ZoodPay to scale its offerings and provide buy-now-pay-later solutions to customers and merchants anytime and anywhere without being restricted exclusively to the ZoodPay network, according to the company.”
The offering will be available to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across multiple geographies. Zoodpay said it would make its SMEs ecosystem available to Mastercard’s merchants, facilitating end-to-end digitisation. The ecosystem would span product onboarding, fulfillment, last-mile delivery, and distribution channels, including ZoodPay’s own marketplace as well as other online platforms,” the statement added.
ZoodPay is a Swiss-based digital lending platform for e-commerce and operates in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq in the Middle East, while also serving Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan. The company says it has more than 300 million consumers and 5 million merchants across these countries.
Last year, the digital e-commerce lender had exceeded 10 million app downloads and recorded a net merchant value growth of 171 per cent.
ZoodPay offers consumers a traditional BNPL product (pay in four installments with no fees) and a lending product with twelve interest-bearing installments. Additionally, ZoodPay helps Zood SME merchants accelerate their online business through inventory financing, which provides them with monthly inventory financing, the necessary warehousing technology, free online content creation, free packing, free sorting, and last-mile delivery through a dedicated fulfillment center and e-logistic solution.
In October last year, the company had launched a Buy Now Pay Later scheme for Jordan, on the MakanE e-commerce platform which serves Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.
The ZoodPay consumer fintech products are distributed across two online channels: the ZoodMall marketplace and on the apps of more than 1,000 partner merchants and websites via API, as well as through offline channels, or ZoodPay in-store, which is currently available in over 3,000 stores in Iraq and Jordan, apart from Uzbekistan.
