Qasif Shahid and Monis Rahman Join Hands to Launch Digital Mobile Wallet

Finja, a recent entrant in Pakistan’s FinTech scene, today announced the pilot launch of its new mobile wallet and its appointment as a Super Agent by Finca Microfinance Bank under the branchless banking framework approved by the State Bank of Pakistan. Finja is jointly conceived by co-founders Qasif Shahid and Monis Rahman, who are known industry veterans with extensive domain experience.

Qasif recently led the development of mobile payment and wallet platforms at MCB Bank Pakistan and AccessBank Tanzania. He previously headed digital banking at ABN AMRO playing a lead role in introducing mobile led commerce in Singapore during the early 2000’s.

Monis is one of Pakistan’s Internet pioneers. He launched ROZEE.PK, Pakistan’s largest online recruitment powerhouse in 2007, serving 65,000 employers and 5.5 Million registered professionals. He has raised $11 Million to date in venture funding for online startups.

The mobile wallet, jointly deployed by Finja and Finca Microfinance Bank, is built on top of Finca Microfinance Bank’s branchless banking platform powered by AutoSoft Dynamic’s AutoMWALLET engine.

The mobile wallet brings several features that will help digital payments scale rapidly. The service is telco, bank and handset agnostic with the philosophy of inter-operating collaboratively with existing payment plumbing.

The product promises a zero customer switching cost with maximum convenience in the spirit of modern social networks. Finja believes that existing payment regimes are not conducive to large-scale behavior change.

“We believe banking products should look more like social networks than conventional banking products,” said Finja’s Founding CEO Qasif Shahid. “Our mobile wallet’s open API platform will allow much needed collaborative creativity from other FinTechs to be leveraged to create building blocks for a wider array of useful financial products”, added Monis Rahman, Finja’s Founding investor.

Mudassir Aqil, CEO of Finca Microfinance Bank, commented on the first of its kind partnership between a bank and FinTech, “What’s new in this partnership is the fact that a microfinance bank’s core and DNA is to lend, which we plan to leverage to incentivize behavior transformation from cash to digital payments”.