CAIRO: MasterCard WorldWide, in partnership with Egyptian electronic payment network Fawry, announced Wednesday the launch of a new service allowing its customers to pay various types of bills with their credit cards via Fawry's extensive network of retail partners across Egypt. “Through this partnership with Fawry, MasterCard holders in Egypt can now use their cards at any one of the 10,000 Fawry providers across the country to pay their bills,” Magdy Hassan, vice president and Egypt country manager of MasterCard WorldWide, told a group of reporters. “Recognizing the need to continue providing our customers with innovative payment options, we worked closely with MasterCard to offer cardholders a new and convenient method for bill payments,” Ashraf Sabry, CEO of Fawry added. “The launch of MasterCard Bill Pay services on the Fawry network allows us to offer consumers increased flexibility and trust in the service.” Fawry, an Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment (EBRPP) network, which was “a completely new idea for Egypt when it started in 2009,” is a network of over 10,000 retail locations such as post offices, banks, grocery stores, pharmacies and other retail locations, that allows customers to pay bills for their mobile and fixed phones, internet services, airline tickets, and e-commerce purchases, Sabry explained. For MasterCard, the partnership represents a new way to address “the needs of Egyptian consumers who are always on the move and require more flexible and secure payment options to make their daily payments,” according to Hassan. By “making things easier and more comfortable for the Egyptian consumer,” the one-stop-shop bill payment concept seeks to have a societal level impact on the country. “There are about 17 million families in Egypt who pay on average, say, 95 million bills each and every month. In total, we can estimate that the process of these paying bills consumes about 90 million hours from Egyptians. These hours incur numerous costs that effect the country's economy, such as energy costs, transaction costs, and the time itself. Overall this has a negative impact on the country,” Sabry explained. In addition to enjoying an extensive network that makes it easy for Egyptians to find a local outlet and pay many different bills at one location, Fawry also allows customers to pay using either cash or credit and debit cards, bringing “further convenience for Egyptians,” he said. While the technology employed by the company reflects the “breed of technology that is being adopted by the world's largest financial institutions and banks, global e-commerce and e-business providers, and thousands of global companies that operate worldwide using the Internet,” Sabry stressed that the company is purely local. “Fawry is 100 percent Egyptian, and we do not import any software from abroad, it is all locally produced,” he said. According to a statement from the company, Fawry also highlights the security of its transactions, saying that its “network is based on a ground-breaking technical infrastructure that acts as a consolidator for the considerable volume of transactions between the biller and bank communities.”
