Gateway to growth
Right from his foray into business in 1998 with telecommunications firm Monty Mobile, to his role today as the founder and CEO of London-headquartered Monty Group, there have been a few traits that have been recurrently used in reports to describe Mountasser Hachem: ambitious, fearless, and always ready to take risks.
As such, one can credit Hachem’s boldness in envisioning goals that is underlining Monty Group’s recent move into the fintech sector with the launch of Monty Finance, a sister company of Monty Mobile. And Hachem has kicked off the venture with two key offerings: the neobank, MyMonty, and the digital payment gateway, MontyPay. While MyMonty’s blockchain-based digital banking services will be launched as a pilot in Europe in January 2022, MontyPay’s global payment gateway is already underway in countries such as the UK, Australia, UAE, Lebanon, Jordan, Nigeria, and many more. At the moment, MontyPay is central to Hachem’s vision to gaining a firm footing in the global fintech sector. “It is true that payment gateways have been around for a long time now, yet they are limited to basic features that would soon be outdated,” Hachem says. “We, at Monty Group, are striving to offer you comprehensive new capabilities that can boost your business, and hence give you an edge over your competitors.”
Indeed, it is the obsolete nature of existing payment gateways that forms the crux of the problem that MontyPay is trying to solve. In fact, its launch comes at a particularly significant stage within the global business ecosystem, given the larger acceptance of cashless payments and mobile wallets over the past two years. While a report by Mordor Intelligence notes that the global payment gateway industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.43% until 2026, there are still quite a few merchants across the MENA region scrambling to achieve seamless migration to online platforms. And while there is an obvious need for platforms that address online payment challenges for merchants, there is also a dearth of solutions. A 2021 study by Yahoo! Finance shows that, in the Middle East in particular, this can be attributed to a lack of regulatory framework for online payment gateways, absence of payment security protocols, as well as high setup costs associated with online payment gateways.
