Arabnet Arabnet

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Telr, the multi-currency and multi-lingual payment gateway for SMEs, has made a a breaking anouncement last week concerning a strategic partnership with Aramex, the regional leader in logistics, and with the hiring of Sirish Kumar as CFO and Co-Founder. “The main objective of this partnership is to make us fulfill one of the three pillars of our value proposition: the integration of payment and logistics,» CEO & Founder at Telr.com Elias Ghanem told Arabnet. « It’s all about simplifying the Merchant-customer experience, by allowing an  integration for payment and shipping. » Telr’s unified logistics and payment application programming interface (APIs), which  allow fast and easy integration, will be managed by Aramex.

Elias Ghanem, CEO & Founder at Telr.com

Set to revolutionize the payment gateways in MENA, the service gives consumers the options of paying by credit card, cash payment on delivery, and cash payment before delivery- all in their own local currency and language.

The long-term objective behind the Telr-Aramex partnership is to help Telr  grow the local E-commerce transactions, which, Ghanem revealed, would reach 15 billion dollars by next year. « Yet only 10 % of the 15 billion is intra MENA, with 90% of the population buying outside MENA.  We want to try to increase the 10% of local merchants so we can bring to MENA a bigger portion of the 15 billion. Our partnership with Aramex is one method of approaching that number. »

Partnering with a comprehensive logistics solution firm like Aramex is a huge win for Telr. As the e-Commerce market heats up in the region, Telr’s unified payment and logistics APIs integration solution would no doubt offer competitive advantage to the user base. Also, both Aramex and Telr are committed to joint efforts to find alternative solutions to the major challenge of ‘Cash on Delivery’, which seems to be integrated in the MENA culture. Online payment, despite being largely popular in Africa, is still struggling as a payment solution in MENA due to lack of consumer trust in the current online service.

“Consumers are not buying locally for two reasons: there are not enough merchants selling here and the experience of buying locally is not good,” said Ghanem. Telr, which aims to be operational in Q3 of 2014, has already established a wide presence of small and large retailers whose identities are yet to be disclosed. “We have a long list of merchants interested in joining our service, and we are open to all types of industries-as long as they are headquartered in Dubai.”

Telr will initially focus on Dubai, with further regional expansion in the Middle East and North Africa following soon after from its Operational HQ in Dubai and will keep a very engaged eye on South East Asia through its headquarters in Singapore.