WFS is the financial services joint venture between Barclays Africa Group (formerly known as Absa), and the continent's foremost food and clothing retailer, Woolworths. WFS provides a broad range of financial services products to more than 1.8 million customers in South Africa and Namibia including store cards, Visa credit cards, personal loans, and insurance.

Emerging Markets Payments (EMP) is a leading pan-African and Middle Eastern payments solutions provider and processor. It provides innovative payments solutions to more than 140 banks and 30 000 merchants in 45 countries and operates processing platforms in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Jordan.

Under the terms of the relationship, EMP will manage the support and development for the WFS VisionPLUS* and TRIAD* credit platforms, as well as the supporting technical environment and integrations.

Doug Walker, CEO of WFS, says, "Due to the criticality of these platforms to our business, WFS were looking to partner with an organisation with deep technical expertise, experience and competence to assure the stability of our systems. The EMP team meet these requirements, with the added benefit of local industry knowledge. Over the past few months we have already begun to experience the benefits of this decision."

Paul Edwards, Executive Chairman of the EMP Group, says, "We are delighted to add Woolworths Financial Services to our growing list of clients in the region. Currently, we host or manage almost 10 million accounts for major South African retailers and financial service providers, processing billions of Rands in transaction value annually. Outsourcing of account management and credit processing has become industry best-practice around the world as companies like EMP can offer a high degree of specialised skills and economies of scale that retailers would not be able to achieve by themselves. In addition, maintaining a high degree of data security has become critical, and EMP EMP can offer a secure processing environment that conforms to the highest global standards. We look forward to a long and productive relationship with WFS."