Oman Arab Bank Completes Visa Tokenisation Rollout as BPC Partnership Hits Ten Years
Oman Arab Bank (OAB) has gone live with Visa tokenisation, completing a card security upgrade that lands just as the Sultanate's electronic payments market moves into a steeper growth phase. The bank announced the rollout alongside payments software provider BPC, with which it is marking ten years of card and payments modernisation.
Tokenisation replaces a customer's card number with a surrogate credential at the point of storage and use, so that a breach at a merchant or wallet provider yields nothing reusable. For OAB cardholders it means better-protected card-on-file and digital wallet transactions, and it puts the bank on the path to Visa Click to Pay, the scheme's browser-based checkout standard, which carries tokenisation as a prerequisite.
The timing is not incidental. Central Bank of Oman data shows the value of transactions through local electronic payment gateways reached roughly RO 3.2 billion in 2025, up 76.3 per cent year on year, while transaction volumes jumped from 67 million to more than 168 million, growth of about 150 per cent. Point-of-sale value exceeded RO 7.5 billion, up 33.2 per cent. Volume growth outpacing value growth by that margin points to a rapidly widening base of low-value everyday digital payments, exactly the segment where card-not-present fraud tends to concentrate.
A decade of infrastructure work
The tokenisation go-live caps a build-out that began with local card services and has since taken OAB into multi-scheme issuing and acquiring across Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Maal, Oman's central-bank-sponsored domestic scheme. Along the way the bank added contactless, enabled instant card issuance at the ATM, modernised its ATM and ITM estate and upgraded its access control server environment for scheme compliance. The platform underpinning it is BPC's SmartVista.
Running issuing and acquiring on a single stack matters commercially as much as technically. It shortens the path from product design to launch for new debit propositions, and it consolidates settlement and reconciliation, a persistent source of cost and operational risk at banks that have accumulated scheme connections piecemeal.
Next on the roadmap is fraud monitoring. OAB says it is extending detection across digital banking, core systems and corporate channels onto one platform, moving away from the distributed, channel-by-channel tooling that most mid-sized banks in the region still run.
Taken together, the announcement reads less as a product launch than as a mid-sized bank finishing the unglamorous groundwork that faster payments make unavoidable. Real-time rails compress the window for fraud intervention to near zero, which pushes the defence upstream into credential security and unified monitoring. The tokenisation-plus-centralised-fraud pattern is now table stakes for tier-two banks in the Gulf, not a differentiator. Institutions still running channel-siloed controls into a market growing at triple-digit transaction volumes are the ones carrying the exposure.
