Kenya's Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), one of East Africa's leading banks, has launched the first U.S. dollar-denominated Visa credit cards in Africa using Tsys' Prime card management solution.
The credit cards offer convenience, and the ability to save on foreign exchange fees, to CBA's customers travelling to the U.S. Purchases in the U.S. can simply by debited from the customer's USD account instead of having every transaction converted to the local currency.
CBA has been a TSYS client since 1997(1) when it began using the PRIME solution to manage issuing, acquiring, collections and rewards for its suite of Visa products. Four new USD credit cards will be added to this portfolio — Classic and Gold versions for personal users and Silver and Gold for business users. The U.S. dollar-denominated cards will be the first foreign currency cards issued by any bank in Kenya.
"The new U.S. dollar cards offer our customers flexibility and convenience when choosing to use their CBA cards internationally, and reflects our commitment to offer innovative products that we believe will be highly successful in the African market," said Gladys Akinyi, Head of Personal Banking at CBA. "Our warm thanks go to TSYS for its help in making this launch possible and its excellent support in ensuring we could bring the new cards to market in record time."
"TSYS congratulates CBA on its decision to leverage our proven PRIME solution to successfully bring the new currency cards to market," said Jaffar Agha-Jaffar, managing director for the Middle East and Africa, TSYS. "Once again, PRIME has shown it is the leading platform for payments innovation, able to deliver an exciting range of new products and services backed by renowned support and global expertise."
TSYS' PRIME is a multi-lingual, multi-currency, multi-institutional and multi-product, single platform solution for issuers and acquirers. It has a global footprint spanning more than 130 clients in more than 70 countries. TSYS has an established presence in Africa and supports more than a dozen banks from its business support team offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
1) Commercial Bank of Africa was formerly a client of Card Tech Limited (CTL) which was acquired by TSYS in 2006