Mastercard and Arab Financial Services have launched corporate credit and prepaid cards integrated with the AFS Pro app in the UAE and Egypt.
The offering is aimed at businesses in the UAE and Egypt and combines card issuance with a broader set of payment acceptance and expense management tools.
Beyond corporate card issuance, AFS Pro is positioned as a business payments platform that allows companies to manage outgoing spend while also accepting, tracking, and reconciling incoming payments from a single application. Through the app, businesses can issue and manage corporate cards, set spending controls, and monitor transactions in real time.
On the acceptance side, AFS Pro includes SoftPOS (tap-to-phone) functionality, allowing merchants to accept contactless payments directly on a smartphone, alongside pay-by-link capability for remote and e-commerce transactions. In addition, the app also provides real-time point-of-sale transaction visibility, business dashboards for sales performance, and reporting tools intended to support reconciliation and business analytics.
Through the process of bringing payables and receivables into a single application, the companies said the aim is to reduce fragmentation across the payment lifecycle and cut down on manual finance processes for business customers.
The offering combines AFS Pro's digital features with Mastercard's card acceptance network and value-added services. According to the companies, the platform is designed for deployment with limited integration work, which would allow banks and financial institutions to bring a business payments proposition to market without extensive in-house development.
The rollout is set to begin in the UAE, followed by Egypt. Both markets have seen increasing demand from financial institutions for digital tools that let corporate customers digitise expense management and gain more oversight of company spending, according to the companies.
Strategic positioning
Mastercard and AFS describe the collaboration as a model that bridges card issuing and payment acceptance within a single, scalable digital platform, rather than treating them as separate business lines. For financial institutions, the proposition is framed as a way to respond to corporate customers' demand for consolidated payment and expense tools without building the underlying infrastructure themselves.
Dr. Samer Soliman, Group CEO, AFS, said the partnership marks an entry into two growth markets for the company and that the alliance is intended to improve efficiency, visibility, and control over corporate spending for businesses in the UAE and Egypt. In addition, Mete Guney, Executive Vice President, Market Development, EEMEA, Mastercard, said the company aims to provide businesses with a scalable, digital-first corporate payments solution through working with AFS.
