eFinance for Digital and Financial Investments has joined forces with Arab Bank to launch an innovative service for government payments, integrated into Arab Bank’s corporate digital platform, “ArabiConnect.” This collaboration underscores eFinance’s leadership in providing cutting-edge electronic payment and collection solutions while supporting Egypt’s broader digital transformation goals. 

Through this partnership, eFinance empowers Arab Bank’s corporate clients to seamlessly handle critical transactions, such as customs duties and tax payments, entirely online. By integrating its advanced digital payment systems into “ArabiConnect,” eFinance enables businesses to complete government payments securely and efficiently, saving time and resources while eliminating the need for branch visits. 

Mr. Ibrahim Sarhan, Chairman and CEO of eFinance investment group, stated: 

“Our collaboration with Arab Bank reflects eFinance’s commitment to continuously advancing digital financial services and electronic payment systems across the banking sector. With over EGP 1 trillion in annual government payment transactions, eFinance is proud to be a fundamental driver of Egypt’s digital economy, facilitating new payment channels that meet the evolving needs of clients.” 

This partnership leverages eFinance’s robust infrastructure and expertise in digital transformation, ensuring secure and seamless payment solutions for Arab Bank’s clients. As the leading provider of electronic financial networks in Egypt, eFinance plays a pivotal role in enabling institutions like Arab Bank to provide innovative services that align with global banking trends. 

By powering services like the “ArabiConnect” platform, eFinance continues to solidify its position as the preferred partner for organizations seeking to enhance their digital capabilities, streamline payment processes, and contribute to Egypt’s transformation into a cashless, digitally integrated economy.

Hossam El-Gamal, the Executive President of the NTRA witnessed the signing of; a cooperative collaboration protocol between eFinance of EFIG and the Egyptian Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Eg-Cert) of the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) to advance digital transformation and cybersecurity.

The protocol was signed by Eng. Hossam el Goly, eFinance’s CEO and Dr. Ahmed AbdelHafez, Vice President for Cyber Security Affairs on the sidelines of  the Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), co-sponsored by eFinance and held by Egypt in Sharm El Sheikh under the auspices of H.E. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

The protocol involves increasing collaboration in ICT, the financial industry, cybersecurity, incident response, digital forensic laboratory analysis, malware analysis, reverse engineering, and enhancing the security of the Egyptian information and communication infrastructure. It also calls for analyzing security incident data and mediating security incidents.

Eng. Hossam el Goly explained that eFinance can offer its cloud computing infrastructure services as well as collaborate in the creation and endorsement of regulatory controls in the fields of information security and cybersecurity and the secure operation of governmental information systems of a financial nature.

Dr. Ahmed AbdelHafez ,on the other hand, explained that he main goal of EG-Cert is to increase the security of the Egyptian information and communication infrastructure through proactive measures, information gathering and analysis, coordination and mediation between the parties involved in resolving security incidents, and international collaboration with other computer and network emergency response teams in other countries.

eFinance announces its cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture Land Reclamation and Agricultural Associations to develop and digitalize the system of managing, trading, and distributing subsidized fertilizers to advance the efforts of the agricultural fertilizer industry.

This protocol comes as a continuation of the cooperation between the Ministry and eFinance to design, construct, manage, and operate the digital agricultural network by launching the first agricultural platform “AgriNet” integrated with digital financing programs, contributing to the disbursement of subsidized fertilizer to farmers electronically from agricultural associations using the farmers’ Meeza cards.

The Minister of Agriculture H.E “El-Said El-Qosair” praised the effort made to develop the digital agriculture network in cooperation with EFIG, and he added that activating the electronic fertilizer control system will contribute to increasing the efficiency of the distribution process and the monitoring of shipping, transportation, and receipt operations from factories to local agricultural associations and the agricultural company’s outlets, to ensure that subsidized fertilizers reach farmers and prevent manipulation in the circulation of these subsidized fertilizers

The experts of eFinance took part in a variety of panels and workshops in the presence of ministers, officials, and cybersecurity executives from significant local and international technology and information security agencies.

• Protecting Cloud Assets Panel
• Security Planning: Ask the Right Questions Panel
• Supply Chain Attacks: How to Control what You Can’t Control Panel
• Securing from Within: Building a Strong Defense against Insider Threats Panel

At the “Protecting Cloud Assets” Panel, Eng. Haytham Elwany, IT & Cloud Solution Delivery Deputy Director at eFinance, spoke about the necessity to list all investment options, assign various weights to the significance and volume of data, and then construct an insurance model for each customer and each set of data and information based on those weights.

At the “Security Planning: Ask the Right Questions” Panel, Eng. Yehia El Gohary, Information Security Deputy Senior Manager at eFinance, spoke about how measuring awareness levels and holding various awareness tests, along with training and awareness sessions for all employees in all jobs and job levels, are all important parts of the planning policies for protection because problems always arise and are unintentional due to the employee’s lack of sufficient awareness.

At the “Supply Chain Attacks: How to Control what You Can’t Control” Panel, Eng. Atef Mohamed, IT & Cloud Director at eFinance, spoke about how the full value of the supply chain must be taken care of because it strengthens the various departments that work within the supply chain in one way or another. The legal department must be involved to ensure complete compliance with the contracts and obligations of each party, and attention must also be paid to the involvement of other departments, financial department, and information technology department.

At the “Securing from Within: Building a Strong Defense against Insider Threats” Panel, Eng. Mahmoud Ebied, IT & Cloud Operation Deputy Senior Manager at eFinance, spoke about how there are many businesses that are dealing with threats from within, and there are numerous solutions available. One of the most crucial is for managers to instill a culture of awareness throughout the organization. This fosters an environment where employees can watch for and identify unusual activity. There must be policies in place to deal with this kind of threat by providing guidelines for spotting suspicious behavior and learning from past mistakes.

Additionally, eFinance demonstrated its capacity to offer data insurance as a stand-alone service to businesses and public and private institutions, enabling the provision of an integrated service system that includes the provision of cadres qualified to activate and manage the security system as well as the potential to provide various information security services offered by all global businesses contracting with eFinance.

Eng. Ibrahim Sarhan, Chairman and CEO of EFIG, said the organization is constantly focused on constant communication and effective presence in various international forums, conferences, and exhibitions, to enhance its role in the field of cybersecurity, and to provide the best protection of data and information by forming international partnerships and luring the most cutting-edge information security technologies.

For the 10th year in a row. EFIG, the strategic partner of CairoICT exhibition accomplished a great success with an outstanding stand design, multiple MoUs, partnerships, new projects kick-offs and panels participations. Below are the highlights of this year’s participation:

• The launch of the First Multi-Cloud Platform in Egypt
• Dr. Nevine el kabbaj, the Minister of Social Solidarity’s visit to EFIG booth
• MoU signing with the Ministry of Education
• MoU signing with the Ministry of Higher Education and Sonaa El Khair CSR
• MoU signing between eHealth and UHIA
• MoU signing between enable and iScore
• MoU signing with Visa
• The launch of ICT Kheir Fund by Dr. Nevine el kabbaj, the Minister of Social Solidarity
• Receiving honorary awards from Vmware, IBM and Cisco
• The performance development of the Egyptian government financial network Workshop
• The Digital Transformation Strategy and Development of Egyptian Tax Authority Systems Workshop
• EFIG’s Connecta participation
• Mr. Atef Mohamed’s participation in XAAS Panel and Multi-cloud: an increasingly popular strategy Panel
• Mr. Ahmed Turkey’s participation in From Cards to Codes Panel
• Mr. Haytham Elwany’s participation in Innovative Solutions for Modern Data Center Considerations Panel
• Mr. Yehia El Gohary’s participation in Building a Government Cybersecurity Framework Panel

EFIG announces the launch of the first biggest multi cloud platform in Egypt during the activities of our strategic partnership with Cairo ICT 2022 exhibition, in partnership with 13 leading global companies in technology and cloud hosting services as follows: F5, Redhat, Huawei, Pure storage, Dell, IBM, Cisco, VMware, Commvault, BMC, Fortinet, Paloalto & Citrix.

For the first time, the group was able to bring together all these leading global institutional expertise in the fields of technology and integrated cloud computing within one project led by “eFinance” to serve the digital transformation operations in Egypt with the most advanced and latest global technologies in a way that suits the needs of various sectors, ministries, institutions, ,public and private sectors companies.

eFinance, Egypt’s national developer of digital payment infrastructures, announced its collaboration with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to grow its digital payment services and enable clients to securely make payments across hybrid cloud environments.

Through this collaboration, eFinance is leveraging the latest IBM Power servers, to upgrade its current infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and streamline business processes to optimize performance.

Currently, many of the eFinance offerings are running on IBM Power10 servers, including electronic payment systems, government POS management systems, the card management and electronic payment system for eKhales and more.

Hossam El Gouly, CEO of eFinance stated that: “As we accelerate into the future of fintech, we need the most advanced technology to underpin our ongoing digital transformation efforts to support our public and private sector clients and provide them with the best-in-class services. We are happy to collaborate with IBM and take pride in offering hybrid cloud services in Egypt in our continued efforts to fast-track digital transformation and deliver an industry standard customer experience”.

Designed to help clients operate in a secured, frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their IT infrastructure, the IBM Power E1080 servers will allow eFinance to deliver end-to-end encryption, scale business-critical applications, and accommodate high-performance transactional workloads through its flexible and secured infrastructure offering.

With a renewed focus by clients on improving sustainability, IBM Power10 E1080 servers deliver 33% lower energy consumption for the same workload when compared to the earlier Power E980 generation, and 52% lower energy consumption when comparing the previous generation of Power E880C servers, thus maximizing reliability in a sustainable way. 

“As financial organizations progress on their modernization journeys, they need an approach that allows various cloud-based applications to work in concert. IBM infrastructure enables a hybrid cloud approach that offers the needed flexibility, resiliency and sustainability for eFinance to cater to their clients’ demands and accelerate their ongoing digital transformation journey” said Marwa Abbas, General Manager, IBM Egypt.

As part of the collaboration, IBM will also provide eFinance with IBM FlashSystems and IBM Software-Defined Storage (SDS), introducing streamlined administration and operational complexity across on-premises, hybrid cloud, virtualized and containerized environments. By providing advanced compression features that will allow data to be stored on significantly less desks than traditional modules, eFinance will be able to host its customer’s data and workloads more efficiently, reducing its data centers and floor space footprints by up to 40% and its energy consumption by 50%.