First credit card firm seals deal with Iran
In absence of international electronic payment companies in the Iranian market, indications are now growing that minor rivals from the country’s neighbors are trying to penetrate into a market many say has huge potentials not seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Iyzico – a Turkish credit card company – has announced a deal with Iran which it says will enable its customers process transactions from some 230 million payment cards that until recently were not connected to any financial system outside Iran.
Reports say the company had been working hard over the past year to penetrate into the Iranian market and expand its domain of services for its clients there.
Iyzico CEO Barbaros Ozbugutu has been quoted by Bloomberg as saying that it made sense to expand to Iran because there are "two major markets in the region with high card penetration, and they’re Iran and Turkey”.
“Both have populations of 80 million, a very young population and quite high Internet penetration," Ozbugutu emphasized.
Iyzico signed the deal to enter Iran after restrictions excluding the country from the SWIFT banking system began to be dismantled as part of an agreement over its nuclear program, reported Bloomberg.
In Iran, all banks are integrated into one unitary clearance system, called Shetab, which means Iyzico’s clients can sell to any card holder in the nation without establishing relationships with individual Iranian banks, Ozbugutu said.
Iyzico last year raised $6.2 million in a round led by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, the investing arm of the World Bank. Its customers in Turkey include BMW, Allianz and online marketplace Sahibinden.com.
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