Fime to support set up of UAE’s domestic card scheme (Jaywan). April 18, 2024

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Digital transformation: the challenges.

26/09/2023
By Raphaël Guilley , VP Solutions at Fime.
Digital transformation: the challenges.

The payment industry landscape is being disrupted by concerns about sovereignty, the emergence of multiple new payment services, and a lack of business control. To meet these challenges, leading domestic schemes must streamline their operations while continuing to innovate. A domestic scheme’s executive committee faces four major challenges:

  • How to foster innovation by reallocating part of the mainstream payment technology maintenance budget to the development of new services.

  • How to accelerate time-to-market for new services and remain competitive.

  • How to manage quality and ensure high customer satisfaction, while balancing skills shortages and onboarding service flexibility.

  • How to be more efficient in managing mandates and market adoption.


No one can address these challenges alone. However, increasing team capacity or extending certification times are not sustainable solutions. Educating stakeholders, enabling automation, and providing domestic schemes with access to a self-service environment would promote autonomy and increase business control. Process optimization, simplification, and automation can lead to faster certification, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced costs.

Domestic schemes also face the challenge of managing both legacy payment methods as well as new payment options in local markets where resources may be limited. To address this, four business processes for certification programs should be considered throughout the digital transformation:

1.   Customer onboarding.

2.  Certification processes.

3.  Technical specification management.

4.  Product lifecycle management.

Providing a better onboarding experience to members, improving time-to-market for new services, optimizing business processes, and enhancing capacity for high-value tasks are key challenges. By optimizing business processes, payment networks can achieve faster certification, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs while staying ahead of the competition in a rapidly changing industry.

Five steps to benefit from digital transformation.

Fime’s global knowledge and experience in certification with all payment stakeholders gives our digital transformation team the skills to identify areas for business process optimization. Fime experts can also support with the simplification of certification processes and automation in tool updates following scheme bulletins. 

Step one. Business process assessment.
Evaluate the organizational business processes in your certification program in line with the industry best practices. 

Step two. Digital transformation strategy and execution plan.
Define a digital transformation plan based on the findings and recommendations of your business processes assessment, and ensure alignment with your company’s priorities and budget.

Step three. Digitalization of processes.
Digitalize and improve process workflows using technologies such as Fime’s MyTest Process solution (a cloud-based online workflow, project, and product management application).

Step four. Technical onboarding.
Provide training and technical onboarding across the organization and to your members / participants.

Step five. Manage digital workflows.
Monitor, maintain and update new payment services and the digital workflows according to feedback from your organization and members / participants.

On average, Fime customers experience a 20% reduction in total certification times, a 50% reduction in certification costs and a 30% increased chance of successful certifications.

What’s next?

Schedule a discovery session to discuss the current challenges and pain points you are experiencing in relation to industry benchmarks and best practices. Fime can help you to explore potential savings and efficiencies.

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