Building inclusive and resilient digital finance | Insights from Ericsson Mobile Financial Services

Pavan Bachwal explains how Ericsson Mobile Financial Services has evolved over 15 years to create a scalable platform that drives financial inclusion and innovation across global markets.

 

At Money 20/20 USA this year, The Paypers had the opportunity to speak with Pavan Bachwal, Head of Ericsson Mobile Financial Services, about how scalable, cloud-native platforms are driving innovation and reshaping digital finance across both emerging and mature markets. Below is the exclusive interview.

Pavan, how would you describe Ericsson Mobile Financial Services? How did it start 15 years ago, and how has it evolved over time?

If we look back at 2009, our goal at Ericsson was to extend our culture of innovation and provide technology for good causes. By working closely with telecommunications clients in the Middle East and Africa, we identified a growing need for a solution that can easily power mobile money and digital financial ecosystems.

That’s how our Ericsson Fintech Platform was born – a solution designed to connect any source of funds (stored value accounts, bank accounts, cards, etc.) with a wide range of financial use cases such as transfers, payments, cash-in, cash-out, etc. Over the past 15 years, the platform has evolved from basic money transfers to more complex products such as remittances, savings, loans, and, more recently, BNPL solutions.

Today, our platform enables telcos and financial institutions across emerging markets to build comprehensive digital financial ecosystems through APIs and modular capabilities.

You mentioned the Middle East and Africa, where you have played an important role in supporting financial inclusion and mobile money movement. Can you share some of the most impactful use cases your clients have launched?

I will start with the fact that our platform processes around 4 billion transactions per month, with a total transactional value of approximately USD 80 billion. These numbers reflect real economic impact.

For merchants, digitising payment acceptance has reduced their dependence on cash, allowing for faster access to working capital and new growth opportunities. This shift has supported business growth and strengthened local economies.

We’ve also seen a strong impact on empowering female entrepreneurship. Digital access to funds reduces the need to handle or store physical cash and allows women to transact independently, start small businesses, and access financial services such as microloans and overdraft facilities.

Through our technology, our customers have been able to offer collateral-free lending based on credit scores and transaction histories, making credit more inclusive and affordable. This has transformed local business dynamics and deepened financial inclusion sustainably.

How is Ericsson Fintech Platform being used in more mature economies? Is it still focused on emerging economies?

From the beginning, we designed the platform to be region-agnostic and customer-agnostic. It serves telecom operators, banks, and fintechs alike.

Some of our clients have even evolved from telecom operators into fully digital banks — for instance, Easypaisa in Pakistan, which started as a telco offering and is now a licenced digital bank.

In mature markets, the focus is on financial convenience. Our platform supports use cases such as family or parental wallets, where parents can manage and control how and where their children spend — for example, ensuring school funds are only usable at approved merchants.

Another common use case is device financing, essentially a BNPL model that lets customers pay for devices in installments. 

Compliance, security, and trust are essential to the success of any digital financial ecosystem. How does Ericsson ensure that its platform remains secure and compliant?

Security has been part of our infrastructure from day one. It is built into every layer of the product, from infrastructure to data to the application layer. This approach allows our customers to focus on innovation and growth without worrying about security risks or vulnerabilities.

We are proud to say that in more than 15 years, there have been no security incidents or fraud traced back to our platform.

We apply a rigorous security-by-design process for every new feature. Each new feature is developed with close collaboration between product managers and security specialists, who assess risks and integrate safeguards into the design.

Our platform is compliant with GDPR, PSD2, PCI DSS, and relevant ISO standards, and we continuously monitor emerging regulations to ensure alignment. We also collaborate closely with partners to maintain an end-to-end security and compliance framework — ensuring our solutions remain reliable, scalable, and fully compliant.

Looking ahead, what is next for Ericsson Mobile Financial Services? How do you see the future of mobile money evolving in this new era of digital finance?

The industry is moving toward what I call financial availability. This means ensuring continuous, resilient access to financial systems even during crises or cyber incidents will be the need of the industry.

As tokenisation and regulated stablecoins gain traction, we see a shift from Web2 wallets to Web3-based financial infrastructures. This will help reduce transaction costs, enhance resilience, and unlock new use cases.

Our platform is designed to accommodate any instrument type — from wallets and bank accounts to cards and now stablecoins — enabling optimal transactions across all these channels.

Ultimately, our focus is on helping our customers improve sustainably by lowering cost per transaction while enabling new business models, growing new revenue streams, and maintaining profitability.

About Pavan Bachwal

 

Pavan Bachwal is Head of Ericsson Mobile Financial Services, driving growth, innovation, and customer outcomes in digital finance. With 19+ years of experience in mobile financial services and digital banking, he has helped telecom operators, banks, and fintechs launch and scale secure wallet platforms, payments, and remittances. He leads strategy, partnerships, and engagement with customers, regulators, and fintech ecosystems worldwide. Pavan holds an MBA from IMD, Switzerland, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Mumbai University.

 

About Ericsson Mobile Financial Services

Ericsson Mobile Financial Services enables operators, banks, and fintechs to deliver secure, scalable mobile money. Active in 22 markets, the platform supports 120M+ users and 573M wallets, processing 38B transactions a year. The modular, API-first architecture powers payments, savings, lending, and remittances while advancing financial inclusion.