Islamabad: One of Pakistan’s top commercial banks, Bank Alfalah, announced the release of Alfa, a new mobile banking app. The goal of New Alfa is to encourage financial inclusion in Pakistan by means of digitization.
Alfa is a popular transactional banking app that is now evolving into a financial lifestyle app. It provides a wide range of features to meet people’s daily financial and lifestyle needs, from transactional banking to financial lifestyle, by enabling users to save, invest, borrow, pay, and onboard.
Deputy Governor Saleem Ullah and other dignitaries from the State Bank of Pakistan graced the launch ceremony, which took place at Bank Alfalah’s Digital Lifestyle Branch. A major milestone in the bank’s dedication to digital innovation was reached with the attendance of senior leadership from Bank Alfalah and influential figures from the digital community.
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Bank Alfalah’s Chief Digital Officer, Muhammad Yahya Khan, delivered a thorough presentation on the new Alfa App, emphasizing its many cutting-edge capabilities, such as:
- Digital Onboarding
- Payments
- Borrowing
- save and Investment
Digital Onboarding:
- Open a full conventional or Islamic bank account with secure biometric verification without going to a branch.
- See all of your assets in one location, including loans, savings, investments, and deposits.
- Change app limitations instantaneously and activate or disable debit and credit cards across channels.
Payments:
- To ensure that you never miss a deadline, set up automatic bill payments for utilities, school fees, loans, and other expenses.
- For safe online purchases, personalize your virtual debit card with spending caps and expiration dates.
- Make easy, contactless purchases without carrying a real card by using secure tokenization.
Borrowing:
- Get rapid access to loans up to PKR 750,000.
- Use AlfaMall to buy things with a Buy Now, Pay Later payment plan.
- Instantly apply for and get a credit card.
Save and Investment:
- The program allows you to save and invest money in term deposit receipts, providing both traditional and Islamic banking alternatives so you can profit from your balances.
- Invest immediately in Treasury bills, mutual funds, securities, and Pakistan investment bonds.
- Create online accounts in USD, GBP, EUR, and AED, and trade currencies between them with ease.
The bank debuted Pakistan’s first instant-processing, completely digital Cheque Deposit Kiosk (CDK) during the inaugural ceremony. Customers can use this device to instantly clear checks.
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The CDK, developed by the bank’s own technologists and data scientists, employs advanced technologies including biometrics, cryptography, machine learning, and optical character recognition (OCR) to digitally accept, scan, and process checks at any time, especially for Bank Alfalah accounts.
The bank intends to use this development to transition a significant amount of manual teller operations to a safe, round-the-clock automated digital platform.
Similar to how they did with the bank’s cash deposit machines, which currently process over Rs. 500 billion in transactions annually, small businesses are probably going to adopt this new approach.