KARACHI: A Karachi-based company, which launched a personal finance management mobile app in 2019, has decided to penetrate Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with other markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, to expand its international footprint, said the company officials on Thursday.
Hysab Kytab is a fully customizable mobile app that offers a platform to manage the user’s financial activities and budgeting.
The app has over 640,000 users who have clocked in more than 12 million transactions.
About 78 percent of them are from Pakistan.
“For the current year, our first target is the MENA region for going global,” Muhammad Yasir Ilyas, global head of Hysab Kytab, told Arab News. “So far, we have developed a good network of 15-plus channel partners including banks in the region. We are also engaging with banks in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Nigeria and other African countries.”
Ilyas continued that his company was also talking to leading global banking solutions providers, such as Temenos and IBM, since it wanted to partner with them before spreading its tentacles in other markets.
“Our target is to make this Pakistani born product a global reality,” he said, adding that the app also provided research data on consumer spending behavior.
Digital financial solutions have been gaining traction in Pakistan -- traditionally a cash-based economy -- since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to a survey conducted by Visa, the use of digital payments, including contactless cards and mobile wallets, increased by 53 percent since the beginning of the contagion.
“Pakistani consumers are increasingly stepping away from cash and putting their trust in digital payments in both in-store and online environments during the pandemic,” Visa said in a statement issued Wednesday.
The financial services company said consumer feedback reinforced the belief that there is no reversal of this trend, with 20 percent of people saying they were less likely to use cash on delivery and 35 percent mentioning the likelihood of using contactless payment methods in the future.
While e-commerce and contactless payments have increased in popularity, the trend of paying by cash on delivery has declined by 28 percent, according to the Visa survey.
Global trend also shows that 12 out 50 startups from Forbes Fintech 50 belong to the personal finance management category.
According to the magazine, together these 12 startups have secured a total funding of $3.6 billion.
