KARACHI

The increasing confidence of public on shopping and foods portals coupled with the development of e-commerce sector in the presence of online payment solution is set to challenge banks' plastic cards business in future.

This has been claimed by Omar Moeen Malik, Head of Strategy, Easypaisa, a branchless banking service of Tameer Microfinance Bank and Telenor in an exclusive interview with Daily The Pak Banker on Thursday.

He hoped that Easypay transactions and volume will grow and replace plastic cards as there are less than 1 million credit cards in Pakistan which are being utilized by the majority of card holders for shopping.

Omar Moeen Malik said the e-commerce market in Pakistan is still small but growing steadily hovering around $25 million to $30 million for the annual revenues due to frequent launch of shopping web portal and increasing confidence of public on this trend. He said almost 2 years ago, Tameer Microfinance Bank launched online payments under the brand 'Easypay' to facilitate ecommerce sites. Many of the top e-commerce sites have already signed up and you can see Easypay as one of the payment options on their websites.

At that time, the biggest problem faced by online sites was the payment collection part. With a bulk of the payments made on Cash On Delivery, there is a big need to digitize these payments. Today, our Easypay solution facilitates e-commerce sites by offering highly flexible APIs that allow businesses to easily integrate Online Payments on their platforms.

He said at the moment, we are working on facilitating the domestic market only for now. For International e-