Arab Financial Services (AFS), the leading digital payment solutions provider and fintech enabler in the Middle East and Africa, has relocated its UAE data center operations to Equinix Dubai International Business Exchange (IBX) facilities in Dubai, known as DX1.
AFS currently has data centers in Bahrain and UAE. As the brainchild of the MENA region’s banking sector, Arab Financial Services (AFS), it is a subsidiary of Bank ABC. Regulated by the Central Bank of Bahrain, and majority-owned by Bank ABC, AFS boasts numerous ground-breaking end-to-end digital payment services and solutions.
These span debit, credit, and Islamic card processing, merchant acquiring, fintech, and a suite of state-of-the-art value-added services. AFS is owned by 37 banks and financial institutions, and serves over 60 clients in more than 20 countries.
Connecting Prime Commercial Hubs
By connecting to one of the prime commercial hubs for international business in the MENA region, AFS opens a vast range of international opportunities for its customers, enabling them to benefit from connections to major international payments companies and cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft, which cements AFS’s reputation for delivering the best opportunities and highest quality payments experience for its customers. Ghassan Mardini, AFS Chief Operating Officer, commented:
“Equinix is the right partner for AFS. As a Company that recognizes digital transformation as a critical business priority, AFS is committed to continuous & evolving innovation across the payments landscape. Establishing a global data center platform helps us further to support our clients and power their digital transaction transformation by providing agile, resilient, secure, and scalable payments solutions. In today’s ongoing and progressive digital transformation, our infrastructure must fuel innovation, not hinder it. AFS’s latest UAE data center will continue to strengthen our position as the leading regional payments, Fintech, and innovation organization.”
Equinix, currently operates more than 240 data centers globally. The new Equinix data center connection gives AFS’s regional payments processing business a secure and powerful global data center platform from which to scale its operations with next-generation digital infrastructure. Kamel Al Tawil, Managing Director MENA, Equinix said:
“Our agreement with AFS is a testament to Equinix being the trusted global platform that businesses rely on to advance their digital-first strategies and equip their digital transformation journeys. Many IT organizations across a range of sectors including financial services, are busy building infrastructure and hybrid multi-cloud architectures at the edge to deal with rapidly expanding data requirements, putting workloads and data protection close to data sources which is where they work best. Equinix is proud to support established and important businesses such as AFS to accelerate business performance and help the company to accelerate their digital transformation agendas.”
AFS has offices and data centers in Bahrain, the UAE, and Oman. Its delivers a portfolio of payment solutions including popular digital mobile wallets, market-leading merchant acquiring services, Bahrain’s leading digital payroll solution, global contact centers and others.
