As Qatar's mobile payments market has rapidly changed, Qatar National Bank's adaption to and roll-out of new technology has had to change with it. The bank's general manager of information technology explains how it has managed to stay ahead of the game.

In a country with 18 banks serving 1.7 million inhabitants, competition for retail customer acquisition and retention in Qatar is understandably fierce.

The level of competition for corporates among banks in Qatar is no less fierce, with Qatar's construction sector booming, in part in preparation for the country's hosting of football's 2022 World Cup tournament. Innovation, value-added services and time to market are always crucial factors to succeeding in a market such as Qatar. When it comes to the latter of these factors, few Middle Eastern banks have been working as fast as Qatar National Bank (QNB).

“We have been very active for the past four or five years. We always experiment with new technology," says Adel Al-Malki, QNB’s general manager of information technology and the man behind these product launches.

Mr Al-Malki has been in charge of QNB’s technology infrastructure, applications development and strategy across the group for the past three years, but his influence on QNB’s product portfolio goes further back than that. After starting his career in IT as a manager in Qatar's Ministry of Interior in 1998, he joined QNB in 2003 as senior manager for the development of the e-business division – one of the first in the Middle East – which went live in 2006. Two years later, QNB went live with Eazymobile, a mobile banking service built as an expansion to its e-banking portal.

Since then, mobile banking, e-banking and alternative payments services have been key growth businesses for QNB, and the bank, Qatar’s largest bank by assets ($82.96bn), has continually added new services such as cardless cash withdrawals and mobile contactless payments to its alternative payments services portfolio. Last year, QNB started up Total Quality, its innovation committee, where, Mr Al-Malki says, the bank tests between 10 to 15 solutions for both retail and corporate clients each year.

Mixed market

Qatar’s mobile payments market profile is a mixture of that seen in developing countries such as Nigeria, where mobile payments were developed for older handsets and are SMS-based, and developed markets, where mobile payments are overwhelmingly done on smartphones, and more often than not require near-field communication (NFC) technology.

QNB’s deals with Qtel, the dominant mobile network provider in Qatar, typifies this profile. In 2010, the two entities partnered to offer SMS-based real-time payments using the recipient’s phone number. But Mr Al-Malki emphasises that the solution works on both smartphones and older handsets. 

This year, the two formed a new strategic partnership to support NFC-payments based on MasterCard’s contactless technology PayPass and the ‘smart’ payments application by Oberthur Technologies. QNB and Qtel customers can choose either an NFC-enabled SIM card or a PayPass sticker free of charge and transfer funds of up to QR100 ($27.50) per day. Payments are linked to QNB MasterCard credit card holders’ accounts.

Mr Al-Malki says that it took the bank three months to launch the NFC products in Qatar. “In the case of NFC, we wanted to be the first in the market and we rolled it out rapidly. With other products, we may take longer. Now we are in the process of rolling it out elsewhere.”

As QNB’s network spans 24 countries, including Yemen, Oman, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, “compliance and domestic regulations are always a bit of a challenge, especially for NFC, and time to launch may take a bit longer, depending on the market,” says Mr Al-Malki.

Before partnering with Qtel, QNB had launched Eazypay, one of the first consumer mobile-to-mobile payments services, in 2010, in Qatar. Four months after launch, the service was extended to include merchant acceptance in January 2011. A cardless ATM cash withdrawal service, Eazycash, followed in May 2011. Eazycash enables QNB customers to send up to QR2000 via SMS to the phone number of the recipient, who receives a code for cash withdrawal. Nowadays, the Qtel mobile wallet is compatible and linked to both Eazycash and and Eazypay services.

Streamlined cash management

With ongoing infrastructure developments in Qatar set out under the government’s National Development Strategy 2011-2016, there is an influx of construction companies in the country as a result of the infrastructure improvement plans. QNB responded to this with a new cash management solution, part of a group-wide integration of QNB’s core banking software.

“The global cash management account integrates a client’s local accounts in one interface,” says Mr Al-Malki. He is confident that no other bank in the world has a single exit point for all accounts of one corporate. The account is already available in Qatar and Kuwait. By the end of the year, it will be live throughout the bank’s network. Indeed, Mr Al-Malki believes it could be up and running by October.

This streamlined core banking infrastructure fits QNB’s expansion plans. Although it lost out to Russia's Sberbank in its bid for DenizBank, the profitable former Turkish subsidiary of Dexia, earlier this year, QNB has continued to expand its network in Oman, Lebanon, Indonesia and South Sudan. “The Middle East is not our target market. Our target is to be a global bank,” says Mr Al-Malki.

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