Waqas Mirza, Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer, Avanza Solutions
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Tell us a bit about Avanza Solutions.
Avanza Solutions leads the marketplace by developing and delivering specialized IT products, solutions and services to Tier one financial institutions, medium to large-sized corporations and government organizations in Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Avanza serves 300+ clients in more than 45 countries. We have over 500+ product deployments, processing over 8+ million transactions every day on 9000+ terminals, backed by a team of 300+ expert resources worldwide.
Avanza also has long standing partnerships with AVAYA, IBM, NCR, Microsoft, HP, Oracle and Teradata where a lot of collaborative product development and technology ventures are jointly launched by Avanza and our partners regularly. We have over 16 years of experience in implementing software solutions globally.
What sort of technologies and solutions do you offer on the market?
Avanza is highly regarded specifically for its financial services technology. We continue to contribute a diverse range of innovative products including award-winning solutions for self-service banking and transaction processing, customer service and experience, and business automation and collaboration.
Tell us about your participation at GITEX Tech Week this year?
Avanza is one of Avaya’s strategic software partner’s in the region, and hence, we were at GITEX to showcase a series of snap-ins jointly with Avaya, for the Breeze platform.
As you know for customers today, experience is everything and at Avanza, we build solutions that deliver relevant, personalized customer experiences. Our I-Alert app (powered by Proximate), or snap-in, proactively pushes or pulls information, as soon the customer initiates contact with a business through an SMS and/or Email.
This location-awareness feature can also be integrated with beacon technology to enable detecting customers in any required proximity, and will enable the ease of interacting with your business representative through the customer’s smart phone.
Which markets do you predominantly focus upon?
Avanza Solutions is headquartered out of Dubai. We predominantly focus on Middle East, South East Asia, Central Asia and African markets.
At Avanza Solutions we are very selective with our partnerships. All our partnerships are a multiyear successful collaboration between us and our partners.
We have numerous regional alliances in Africa, East Asia and Central Asia with like-minded and dynamic organizations, whom we complement through our niche set of Channel Banking products and services to gain bigger market shares in these regions.
Do you offer any channel partner program in this region?
As we are headquartered in Dubai and our teams closely collaborate with all our customers directly across all GCC countries, therefore we do not engage or sign up channel partners.
In the region, our strategic alliances with Partners such as IBM, NCR and Avaya helps our business development. But these are more of joint and collaborative product development and go to market collaborations instead of a typical channel / distributor engagement.
Do you offer any channel certification program?
At Avanza we take our partner program very seriously and thoroughly. We have placed a complete certification cycle that our partners have to go through. This cycle is run regularly year on year evaluating each partner on key parameters including but not being limited to market reach and penetration, regular product trainings, end user feedback, and so on.
What sort of tech trends do you foresee for the MEA region?
Avanza is first and foremost a research led firm. We actively invest in building technologies that are not only trend setting but will also have a lasting positive impact on the lives of end users. As such we feel block chain and crypto currency is the new tech wave that will be digitally enhancing the regions economy soon.
Another key area where there will be development is consumer experience management. With the growth of technologies like AI, BOTS, AR/VR organizations will actively seek to incorporate these latest tends into their consumer experience (CX) leading to far better serviceability in the near future.
We feel that the GCC is primed for innovation. Organizations be they vendors, partners or end users need to invest into solutions that help them keep up with the pace of consumer expectations. In the race to remain relevant you can’t ignore the need to innovate.