Last week TSTT and PESH Mon­ey be­gan to un­veil their plans for their up­com­ing mo­bile wal­lets af­ter be­ing grant­ed E-mon­ey li­cens­es by the Cen­tral Bank, but there has been a com­pa­ny that bolt­ed out of the blocks since Au­gust of last year; Pay­wise.

The com­pa­ny was the first non-fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion to be grant­ed such per­mis­sion and had spent the last six months work­ing on build­ing the frame­work for its plat­form to be used wide­ly.

“Since we have been grant­ed the li­cense. We have been speak­ing to dif­fer­ent en­ti­ties to form part­ner­ships to fa­cil­i­tate that kind of ease or al­ter­na­tive pay­ment meth­ods for a per­son to make pay­ments to dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es and en­ti­ties around the coun­try,” said Ian Al­leyne, founder and di­rec­tor of Pay­wise.

The com­pa­ny has been around since 2013 when Al­leyne and his team not­ed the lim­it­ed pay­ment op­tions for busi­ness­es and in par­tic­u­lar small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es.

“Par­tic­u­lar­ly for SMEs the mode of pay­ment was cash on de­liv­ery and of course, you know the dan­gers and in­con­ve­niences as­so­ci­at­ed with that. So Pay­wise saw a gap and as a re­sult of that we cre­at­ed a pay­ment ser­vice us­ing a net­work of agents, where mer­chants can di­rect their cus­tomers to these agent lo­ca­tions across the coun­try to make pay­ments to them,” said Al­leyne.

“So they no longer had to go meet the cus­tomer to re­ceive these pay­ments and of course be sub­ject to rob­beries at­tacks and so on,” he said.

By 2019, the com­pa­ny not­ed there was a grow­ing call for dig­i­tal pay­ment op­tions and start­ed ex­plor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing a mo­bile wal­let. The recog­ni­tion of this shift ul­ti­mate­ly put Pay­wise at the head of the queue when the Cen­tral Bank re­viewed ap­pli­ca­tions.

“We saw the shift in the mar­ket­place. There was an in­creas­ing fo­cus on dig­i­tal pay­ments and card pay­ments. And we de­cid­ed to take it to the next lev­el to pro­vide dig­i­tal pay­ment so­lu­tions via a mo­bile wal­let. We start­ed the de­vel­op­ment of the mo­bile wal­let in 2019 and in 2020 COVID hit, so from our point of view, it was a good de­ci­sion for us to move in that di­rec­tion. In 2020 we al­so ap­plied for the li­cense, the e-mon­ey is­suer li­cense from the Cen­tral Bank but at the same time we con­tin­ued to de­vel­op the ap­pli­ca­tion. We re­ceived the li­cense and we ba­si­cal­ly had a full-fledged mo­bile wal­let ready for launch,” said Al­leyne.

The Pay­wise mo­bile wal­let can be down­loaded for both An­droid and iPhone. It can be topped up through their var­i­ous agent lo­ca­tion around the coun­try or through de­posits via lo­cal bank cards.

Al­leyne said the com­pa­ny has con­tin­ued to ex­plore ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty op­tions for day-to-day use to en­sure that the ser­vice is us­able by the com­mon man.

“Pay­wise pri­ma­ry ob­jec­tive to is em­pow­er the man in the street fi­nan­cial­ly, that is give him more con­ve­nience and eas­i­er ways in which he can man­age his mon­ey.

“As part of that ob­jec­tive, we aim to in­crease the lev­el of fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion with­in the coun­try and provider a broad­er more ac­ces­si­ble means for the man in the street to ac­cess fi­nan­cial ser­vices lo­cal­ly” said Al­leyne, who ex­plained the com­pa­ny was now work­ing on ways to make Pay­wise an op­tion in more com­mon sce­nar­ios.

“To make it more rel­e­vant to the man in the street, it has to con­nect to re­al-world pay­ment re­quire­ments. It has to con­nect in a way to al­low the man on the street to make the pay­ments he would make with cash, now with a mo­bile wal­let.

“In oth­er words, you have to part­ner with and con­nect with dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es, and en­ti­ties with­in the coun­try to pro­vide that al­ter­na­tive means of mak­ing pay­ments now via our dig­i­tal so­lu­tion,” said Al­leyne who did not di­vulge ex­act­ly how many com­pa­nies had adopt­ed their e-com­merce op­tions, but stressed that it was a grow­ing num­ber. When the HDC launched its e-pay por­tal re­cent­ly, it was built on Pay­wise’s in­fra­struc­ture.

Al­leyne said that sev­er­al busi­ness­es are in­ter­est­ed in adopt­ing the tech­nol­o­gy, as they ac­cept that dig­i­tal meth­ods have great ben­e­fits.

“A lot of com­pa­nies are com­ing with us be­cause they say that they want to re­duce the han­dling of cash be­cause there is a cost to han­dle cash. They want to re­duce that. They un­der­stand that the mo­bile space is new, and they un­der­stand that the new al­ter­na­tive is new.

“They see the ben­e­fit of it and they are will­ing to work with us in terms of bring­ing their cus­tomer base in­to our plat­form so they re­duce the lev­el of cash be­ing han­dled,” said Al­leyne who not­ed the pan­dem­ic helped bring many com­pa­nies on board with that think­ing.

“When the pan­dem­ic hit it re­in­forced our de­ci­sion to go mo­bile be­cause at that time there was a lift, an in­crease in in­ter­est in do­ing on­line pay­ment or al­ter­na­tive pay­ment meth­ods to cash. And we have made that shift and the shift hasn’t been stopped,” he said.

The pend­ing in­tro­duc­tion of TSTT’s PAYPR and PESH Mon­ey will mean Pay­wise is no longer the on­ly op­tion for e-mon­ey, but Al­leyne is not per­turbed by this de­vel­op­ment.

He not­ed that in the fi­nan­cial ser­vices sec­tor, banks and in­sur­ance com­pa­nies can thrive de­spite var­i­ous com­peti­tors in the field.

“We look at it like this, the fi­nan­cial ser­vice in­dus­try has many dif­fer­ent types of pay­ments, we have in­sur­ance, we have bank­ing ser­vices,” said Al­leyne.

“We have sev­er­al banks, we have sev­er­al in­sur­ance com­pa­nies and they all op­er­ate and they all sur­vive. We look at the e-mon­ey sec­tor as no dif­fer­ent. Al­though we were first, we ex­pect ad­di­tion­al com­peti­tors to come in to in­crease the vi­bran­cy with­in the sec­tor,” he said.

He al­so ac­knowl­edged that there was a chal­lenge to get the wider pub­lic to adopt such a ser­vice, how­ev­er, he felt those who had been ex­posed to such op­tions in for­eign coun­tries could cre­ate a vi­able start­ing point for the bur­geon­ing in­dus­try.

“We do un­der­stand that it is a new tech­nol­o­gy and there is some lev­el of ed­u­ca­tion that is re­quired to ad­vise the man in the street of the ben­e­fits of it. But we do un­der­stand that there is an­oth­er seg­ment of the lo­cal mar­ket that is fa­mil­iar with sim­i­lar ap­pli­ca­tions in oth­er coun­tries. And they are al­so very much ex­cit­ed to see some­thing like that avail­able to them lo­cal­ly,” said Al­leyne.

“So we un­der­stand that there are two mar­kets that we are look­ing at, the more so­phis­ti­cat­ed ap­pli­ca­tion user who is ful­ly aware of mo­bile wal­let ser­vices and may have used those in for­eign coun­tries but lo­cal­ly don’t have them.

“Pay­wise will pro­vide that so­lu­tion for them and at the same point in time, we know that our lo­cal com­mu­ni­ty is one that is quite ea­ger some­times to try new things and we hope that our prod­uct will suit their needs and they will adopt it,” he said.