LuLu Money Singapore launches cross-border payments platform in UAE

LuLu Money Singapore, a unit of Abu Dhabi-based LuLu Financial Holding, is set to pioneer its digital payments ecosystem in the UAE with the rollout of Digit9, the company’s cross-border payments platform.

Digit9 is a Remittance-as-a-Service (RaaS) product that was developed in collaboration with Endava, a digital transformation and intelligent automation solutions provider.

The platform seeks to promote financial flexibility, reliability, and transparency, thus empowering banks and fintech firms to seamlessly execute multi-currency remittances in real-time.

LuLu Money Singapore said the platform will serve a global network of more than 2,000 partners. Digit9 is being launched in the UAE in partnership with LuLu Exchange.

The product has been built on Open Banking standards to enable a much broader range of financial institutions to meet the market demand for a truly mature cross-border payments platform.

Companies can leverage Digit9’s core functionality which enables it to be conveniently white-labelled and embedded into innovative new financial applications and organisational workflows, LuLu Money Singapore said in a statement.

“Through Digit9, we aim to democratise remittances, enabling financial ins across the spectrum to build powerful cross-border payments applications without the prohibitive costs and complexities associated with establishing a robust underlying infrastructure,” said Joseph Cleetus, AVP of Business Transformation at LuLu Financial Holdings.

“We are delighted to partner with Endava whose pioneering work in this space convinced us early on, of their ability to enable our digital acceleration and ensure global best practices were infused into every aspect of our product.”

Leveraging LuLu Money’s capabilities

Digit9 can handle more than 300 transactions per second across a network of over 2,000 global partners.

Endava designed the solution architecture to offer three key functionalities — act as a white-label solution for payment distribution networks to partners, enabling organisations the ability to Build Your Own Network (BYON) and configure their correspondent banks.

The platform’s capabilities include serving as a managed treasury service that provides the best real-time foreign exchange (FX) rates to customers using the platform’s in-built analytics engine, experienced FX dealers, and automated market-making and liquidity pool managers.

“Far from resting on its laurels, Digit9 and LuLu Exchange have risen to the challenge of creating a powerful digital payments platform which will revolutionise the critical cross-border payments segment in the UAE and broader MENA region,” said David Boast, general manager of UAE at Endava.

“It will be exciting to see how financial institutions and other organisations will leverage Digit9 to create new and impactful applications that serve the remittance needs of the region’s significant expat population.”

Critical to the development of the fintech platform has been The Endava Adaptive Model (TEAM), a framework which streamlines and accelerates software development.

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