In several conversations we’ve had with entrepreneurs from the local ecosystem, we’ve found one major pain point to be common. Each of them are asked about their ‘industry experience’ and at the same time, are usually not given that outlet by large organizations in the first place.
However, if there is one industry that is stressed to change this, and putting these solutions and services to test, it’s the financial services industry, with banks taking a lead on this. Recently, JS Bank, in collaboration with its partner Abacus Consulting recently organized Pakistan’s first APIthon, held in Lahore earlier this month. Similarly, HBL and UBL have been on the forefront when it comes to driving open industry innovation challenges and supporting the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In recent news, Soneri Bank has just signed a strategic alliance with Fetch Sky for their product Peekaboo Connect to bring together the combined expertise of companies on one common platform. These are bound by their mutual goal of providing innovative and advanced financial services to the customers.
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Speaking to IDG Pakistan about this milestone is the Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at Peekaboo Guru, Muhammad Ali Khoja. He said:
“FetchSky takes immense pride to announce the integration of ‘Peekaboo Connect’ with Soneri Bank”
Peekaboo Connect is an extracted version of the Peekaboo Guru platform and designed to transform the traditional banking into branchless banking. It is a suite of services, empowered by Loyalty & Offers, navigational branch locators with rich and standardized data and technology to access the products.
With location services and consumer intelligence, Peekaboo Connect empowers the banks to understand the trends and preferences of their customers which helps them gain meaningful insight about them.
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Referring to the corporate innovation partnership between the said parties, he adds,
“We are glad to see that the banks in Pakistan are beginning to understand the need to collaborate with Fintechs to add more value to the customers. Soneri Bank has been instrumental in proactively responding to the need of the hour.
Peekaboo Connect will also act as bridge between the financial institutions and third party service provider in an attempt to allow the banking consumers to access different services on banking platform”.
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2018 and Beyond
The bank will integrate FetchSky’s Peekaboo Connect on all its digital platforms including the Soneri Bank mobile application, corporate website and social media properties. Ali shared that Peekaboo Connect is already live on four banking platforms, with their forecast on another four going live by the end of the first quarter of 2018.
This would also endorse fair treatment of customers (FTC) endeavors of upgrading banking services and providing customers with one-window operation, thus making banking efficient in the digital era. It would also help it to understand customers better, engage with them at a retail level, monitor and upgrade product & services accordingly.
The Soneri Debit MasterCard has various discount offers on apparel, healthcare and lifestyle products and services already. Moving forward in collaboration with Peekaboo, the bank plans to bring on board more merchants in the future to offer an enhanced portfolio of discount offers.
