Verve, Interswitch Group’s innovative card scheme has promised to continually improve financial inclusion and significantly enhance digital payment solutions by making its platform even more seamless and efficient for payment services across the world.
Mitchell Elegbe, founder/GMD, Interswitch Group made this promise during a media parley held in Lagos to mark the 10th year anniversary of Verve.
During the event which had in attendance, members of the media, partner banks, other trade partners and representative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Elegbe cited penetration as a major challenge for payment solutions providers in the country.
“With all the payment companies we have in Nigeria today, penetration is still less than 10 percent. The real enemy is cash which takes 90 percent as the preferred payment method. You have to be extremely lazy as a payment company not to do well in a market where cash is still 90 percent,” he said.
According to him, collaboration and partnerships would be very crucial to changing these statistics and providing better solutions to customers and the company remains committed to that cause.
Recounting the company’s experiences over the years, Mike Ogbalu III, chief executive officer, Verve, said that the journey so far had not been easy but the company has understood that they had to do things differently in order to solve existing problems in the Nigerian market.
The company was the first to come up with the first instant issuance technology as customers could now get their cards issued on first time request.
“Prior to this time, for you to issue a card to a customer, the customer has to go into a bank branch, apply for the card and probably come back after two weeks. But then, we felt that failure to issue a card to a customer and him not being able to activate it right there on the first visit, reduces activity rate by at least 20 percent.”
Ogbalu stated that the company’s deep knowledge of the Nigerian market had given them an edge over competitors.
“We have once again placed a bet that payments would continue to evolve. Today we have also invested in innovations, we have our products both physical and virtual and today we issue these cards here in Nigeria and in 12 countries across Africa.”
With a product launch in New York recently, the Verve card which is currently accepted in about 22 African countries is now accepted in over 185 countries globally and across 9 channels and about 42 million cardholders so far.
Verve was launched in 2009 and is currently the only African card scheme that is a member of EMVCo, the global body responsible for setting and regulating payment card standards.
