An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Mak­ing per­son-to-per­son mo­bile pay­ments just got eas­i­er in T&T, as Pesh Mon­ey Ltd launched its mo­bile app yes­ter­day.

The launch took place at One Fin­tech Ave, at the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain.

Jeanette Joseph, Cen­tral Bank’s as­sis­tant man­ag­er of pay­ments and fi­nan­cial mar­kets in­fra­struc­ture, said in Sep­tem­ber, that Pesh Mon­ey achieved full e-mon­ey is­suer reg­is­tra­tion with the Cen­tral Bank of T&T.

On Feb­ru­ary 1, 2023 the Cen­tral Bank is­sued pro­vi­sion­al reg­is­tra­tions to Pesh Mon­ey and TSTT as elec­tron­ic mon­ey (e-mon­ey) is­suers. The pro­vi­sion­al reg­is­tra­tions, which cov­er an ini­tial six-month pe­ri­od, au­tho­rise TSTT and PESH to is­sue e-mon­ey in T&T from March 1.

Joseph not­ed that one of the main ob­jec­tives of the Cen­tral Bank is to main­tain fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty, as with the on­set of dig­i­tal pay­ments the bank has ex­pand­ed its reg­u­la­to­ry am­bit, to cov­er the risks that arise from these emerg­ing pay­ment mar­kets, such as con­sumer pro­tec­tion, cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty and gov­er­nance is­sues.

While Joseph said while the fo­cus of the per­son-to-per­son mo­bile pay­ments would be to em­pow­er the con­sumer by fa­cil­i­tat­ing more in­stant pay­ments, the req­ui­site con­trols must be im­ple­ment­ed to mit­i­gate risks ac­cord­ing­ly.

“The Cen­tral Bank is com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing that the sec­tor is ad­e­quate­ly reg­u­lat­ed and that cus­tomers’ funds are safe and re­main con­fi­dent in the na­tion­al pay­ment sys­tem,” she re­marked.

Al­so speak­ing was the founder of Pesh Mon­ey, Si­mon For­tuné, who said no reg­is­tra­tion fee is at­tached, there are no per­son-to-per­son trans­ac­tion fees, just a flat fee of $5 when a cus­tomers is us­ing their ac­count to fa­cil­i­tate the trans­ac­tion.

He in­di­cat­ed that trans­ac­tions from one Pesh wal­let to an­oth­er are in­stant, but if you are adding funds or with­draw­ing funds from your bank ac­count, it may take one to two busi­ness days.

For­tuné said the lim­it per trans­ac­tion is $1,000, and with­in a month the cus­tomer can do up to $20,000 in trans­ac­tions and then the per­son has a $20,000 wal­let max bal­ance.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the founder said that in line with the reg­u­la­tions, the ser­vice on­ly sup­ports TT dol­lars and does not sup­port in­ter­na­tion­al wires or trans­ac­tions.

“Pesh is a com­plete­ly pa­per­less and cash­less sys­tem, so you would not get any Pesh vouch­ers. There is no Pesh agent to go pay them, so is just bank ac­counts and we are not do­ing cred­it cards, be­cause we want­ed to make sure that the cost for us­ing it was as low as pos­si­ble. I mean $5 is less than dou­bles,” he stat­ed.

Asked about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cy­ber­at­tack, For­tuné said the com­pa­ny has poli­cies in place to is­sue press re­leas­es to in­form cus­tomers.

“As part of the reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments, we had to in­sti­tute pen­e­tra­tion test­ing to make sure the sys­tem was se­cure. So, all those pro­to­cols are in place. But if for some rea­son there is an at­tack, we have our process­es to is­sue press re­leas­es and let the users know,” he men­tioned.

The Pesh Mon­ey mo­bile app is avail­able on both iOS and An­droid.