Abu Dhabi-based Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider NymCard, has raised a $7.6 million Series A funding round, led by Shorooq Partners, with participation from OTF Jasoor Ventures and VentureSouq. This round takes the startup’s total funding raised to date to $12 million.

Launched in 2017, NymCard delivers an API-based processing platform to financial institutions, banks, and fintechs that digitises payment card issuance helping them to cut costs and launch customer focused payment programmes in a timeframe of fewer than eight weeks.  With its technology, NymCard helps fintechs and other emerging financial institutions make a full-scale foray into the market and accelerate their growth.

“We have developed the tech stack ground-up giving us speed and agility that no other legacy player can match. Over the past two years, we have served regional banks and fintechs where one of our clients today is the fastest-growing issuer in Iraq and is the first neobank in the region,” said Omar Onsi, founder and CEO of NymCard.

With the fresh funds, NymCard is planning to expand in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.

NymCard received regulatory approvals from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) to be able to remove the regulatory friction from issuing payment cards to its clients.

Mahmoud Adi, founding partner of Shorooq Partners, said: “NymCard is solving the problem of card issuance in the region by building a regulated, technological infrastructure that is highly specialised in this area. It allows the rest of the ecosystem to leverage their technology as a plug-and-play infrastructure to seamlessly build and launch card programs, democratising card issuance and payments.

“The cash to card shift continues to be a main driver in digital transformation within the payments ecosystem in the region. As a result, multiple banks, NBFIs, and startups are rushing to extend card payment solutions to consumers. Card issuance and payment processing, however, it’s a tightly controlled, highly regulated, and technologically complicated process and even the largest banks in the region take months to design and issue card programs. The NymCard technology addresses these issues and enables clients to adapt their models to the new environment efficiently and cost-effectively,” he added.