Juspay eyes the GCC’s payment fragmentation to orchestrate growth

Juspay plugs Al-Futtaim into its payment orchestration system as it scales GCC presence: Al-Futtaim began rolling out Indian fintech Juspay's payment orchestration system across its brands in September, connecting them to multiple acquirers, local payment methods and payment partners through a single layer, according to a press release.

Who is Juspay? The Bengaluru-based fintech processes around 350 mn daily transactions, globally and holds more than USD 1 tn in annualized Total Payment Volume, making its regional debut in the Dubai International Financial Center in February. It currently maintains a portfolio of roughly 600 enterprise merchants in the UAE, the firm’s head of APAC and the Middle East Nakul Kothari tells EnterpriseAM.

“GCC is becoming a very key market for us. We are seeing very strong demand for payment orchestration in the market,” Kothari tells us.

The pitch is the Gulf’s patchwork of payment rails: Where India consolidated around a single dominant rail in UPI, every GCC market has built its own: Kuwait has KNet, Bahrain has Benefit, Qatar has NAPS and Saudi Arabia has mada. The UAE now has a national card scheme, Jaywan, and an instant payments platform, Aani, both run by Central Bank subsidiary Al Etihad Payments. Each new rail brings its own rules, reconciliation and routing decisions for merchants operating across borders. “Every country has their own local rails. So you have to build that infrastructure that can be customizable at every country level,” Kothari says.

How it works: Juspay sits between Al-Futtaim’s brands on one side and acquirers and local rails on the other, so the conglomerate can add or drop a payment provider in a given market without rebuilding its checkout. “They can enable or disable — it's just kind of a toggle — any acquirer via a local payment method and they can just go live,” Kothari says.

It’s pitching banks too: Much of the Gulf’s banking system still runs on legacy mainframes and fragmented payment stacks. Juspay argues an orchestration layer lets banks support more payment methods, raise transaction success rates and launch embedded finance services without overhauling their core systems.