World’s Best Banks 2021: Middle East
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May 04, 2021
This year was an exceptional one for everyone, everywhere, but perhaps even more so in the Middle East, where the economic slowdown induced by the pandemic was amplified by the drastic drop in oil prices and production.
As a result, regional GDP contracted by 3.8% in 2020, reports the World Bank in its April update, adding that the estimated accumulated cost of the pandemic in terms of GDP losses to the region’s economies by the end of 2021 will amount to $227 billion.
To try and weather the storm, governments set up stimulus packages and borrowed massively to sustain health care, housing and social welfare. As is often the case in times of crisis, structural imbalances were pointed out as major impediments to economic recovery, and decision-makers pulled the reform agenda back from their priority lists.
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Mastercard and ACI Worldwide to provide real-time payments plumbing in Peru 22 February 2021
Source: Mastercad Mastercard and ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time digital payment software and solutions, today announced that Cámara de Compensación Electrónica (CCE) will utilize the ACI Enterprise Payments Platform to accelerate financial institutions’ access to Mastercard’s Instant Payment Service, the new real-time payments managed service that will enter Industry Testing in Peru later this year.