BenefitPay’s remittance service: Accessibility, choice, convenience
Gulf Insider speaks with Ahmed Al-Mahri, Senior Manager at BENEFIT’s Financial Development Services Department, on the newly launched BenefitPay remittance services.
As Bahrain’s leading regional player in electronic financial transactions, how do you aim to improve efficiency with the new digital remittance service?
Being a national platform, we always aim to provide efficiency and accessibility to services to our clients as well as our members and financial institutions. Our ‘marketplace’ concept is designed to add efficiency to all parties involved.
Being one of the first in the region to provide such service, we provide our customers with choice as well as accessibility and reach.
For efficiency, people can go on the app, compare prices, and choose which companies they want to remit with.
How safe and secure is the new service?
It’s all governed under the Central Bank of Bahrain’s regulation and rules. So, all rights and regulations are in place to govern and protect our customers.
The wallet is linked to a single device – and cannot be accessed unless given authorisation by the account owner. We have the pin and biometric authentication, plus, a validation by OTP verification. All the steps are taken to ensure maximum security for the user.
How is sending money via this service different from visiting a remittance outlet or via the remittance’s own app?
It’s more of a matter of convenience to the customer. We can guarantee that we have implemented all levels of self-service within the app, providing accessibility as well as a range of choice for our users.
The BenefitPay app provides many services from quick money transfers and bill payments and even easy petrol payment. Any additional services we should look forward to?
Not to reveal anything too soon, but we have a list of services en route as well as a major revamp for the look and feel of BenefitPay coming up. This will come with a lot of interesting new features that address our customers’ needs and requirements.
When all of this is happening – let’s let that be a surprise.
What is your vision for Bahrain’s financial sector in the next 5 years?
We’ve seen a lot of improvement and evolution in the sector over the recent years. As Bahrain’s leading regional player in electronic financial transactions, aim for the coming years is to have empowered and keep empowering other players in the market to maximise their reach and innovation.
