- ZoodPay will serve as Mastercard’s lending partner for consumers and SMEs across multiple geographies

By :Basel Khaled 

 ZoodPay, a leading digital lending platform for e-commerce in the Middle East and Central Asia, has entered into a strategic partnership with Mastercard to launch the first-of-its-kind prepaid virtual installment card in the Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EEMEA) region.

This collaboration will 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 (BNPL) solutions to customers and merchants anytime and anywhere without being restricted exclusively to the ZoodPay network.

The offering will be available to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across multiple geographies. Zoodpay will make its SMEs ecosystem available to Mastercard’s merchants, facilitating end-to-end digitization. This ecosystem will span product onboarding, fulfillment, last-mile delivery, and distribution channels, including ZoodPay’s own marketplace as well as other online platforms.

Mastercard will supplement this by providing access to its wide network of merchants, innovative payment methods, and state-of-the-art technical infrastructure for enablement and scalability.

This partnership can serve up to 300 million people, including 5 million SMEs and 4,000 merchants, providing BNPL options for consumers and loans for SMEs.

Amnah Ajmal, Executive Vice President, Market Development at Mastercard EEMEA, said: “Consumers and merchants want choice and safety when it comes to payments.

By partnering with ZoodPay, we are leveraging our technology to enable these payments in a digitally secure way.”

ZoodPay has 4,000 online and offline merchants with a proprietary marketplace, which is used by over 10 million people.

Michael Khoi, CEO of ZoodPay, said: “Our partnership with Mastercard will go a long way in shaping the future of digital payments across emerging markets. We are looking forward to the launch of a holistic suite of fintech services for consumers, merchants, micro and small and medium enterprises, helping the unbanked population access the financial ecosystem.” 

According to Juniper Research, BNPL services will account for more than 24% of global e-commerce transactions for physical goods by value by 2026, up from 9% in 2021. The number of global installment users will more than quadruple to 1.5 billion in 2026 from 340 million in 2021.