When the Cen­tral Bank an­nounced last week that it had is­sued pro­vi­sion­al reg­is­tra­tions to two com­pa­nies; Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T Ltd (TSTT) and PESH Mon­ey Ltd, many had the ques­tion?

Who or what is PESH Mon­ey?

At the time of the Cen­tral Bank re­lease, the com­pa­ny had no vis­i­ble on­line pres­ence but it had been wait­ing on this mo­ment for al­most half a decade.

Min­neso­ta-based soft­ware de­vel­op­er Si­mon For­tuné, found­ed the com­pa­ny in 2017, as he not­ed the lack of e-mon­ey op­tions avail­able in the lo­cal mar­ket.

“The com­pa­ny was reg­is­tered in 2017. How I got the idea is, you know, I’m a born and raised Trinida­di­an, I live in the US now. And I re­alised vis­it­ing home that there are lots of ser­vices that I use in the US on a dai­ly ba­sis. And I was won­der­ing, why don’t these ser­vices ex­ist in Trinidad?” said For­tuné who is orig­i­nal­ly from St Au­gus­tine.

So For­tuné said he be­gan look­ing in­to what it would take to cre­ate a dig­i­tal wal­let in the vein of Pay­pal and Ven­mo for T&T.

De­spite mak­ing those ini­tial plans, the com­pa­ny hit a le­gal wall.

“I start­ed look­ing to see how I can build a ser­vice like that in T&T. Now in 2017 there was re­al­ly no le­gal frame­work in Trinidad for non-fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to is­sue any sort of dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy. So that sort of put a pause.

“So while the com­pa­ny was reg­is­tered, we couldn’t re­al­ly op­er­ate. So we met with the Cen­tral Bank in 2018 to de­ter­mine, where the coun­try was at with this. What are the le­gal frame­works around that? But there wasn’t any at the time. So I still had the vi­sion to build a ser­vice and start­ed de­vel­op­ing it,” said For­tuné.

A sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ment for the com­pa­ny oc­curred in Au­gust 2020 when the e-mon­ey pol­i­cy came in­to law paving the way for non-fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to is­sue e-mon­ey.

Still, the com­pa­ny would have to wait un­til the Cen­tral Bank’s an­nounce­ment last week, to un­veil it­self. The com­pa­ny’s web­site went live hours af­ter the per­mit was grant­ed, and the com­pa­ny al­so an­nounced it­self on its so­cial me­dia pages.

“You could see ba­si­cal­ly from Au­gust 2020 to Feb­ru­ary 1, 2023, in over two and a half years, we’ve been de­vel­op­ing the soft­ware on this plat­form to meet the very strin­gent rules and reg­u­la­tions that the Cen­tral Bank has in place,” For­tuné made it clear that PESH is not a cryp­to-cur­ren­cy but dig­i­tal wal­let that works on­ly with TT dol­lars and in­ter­acts with the lo­cal bank­ing sec­tor.

“The way that the ap­pli­ca­tion is de­signed, is that you would cre­ate an ac­count, user­name and pass­word and you would se­lect your lo­cal ac­count, right so it on­ly works with T&T banks,” said For­tuné who ex­plained that up­on se­lect­ing their lo­cal bank and giv­ing ac­count de­tails to al­low for a ver­i­fi­ca­tion process not dis­sim­i­lar to in­ter­na­tion­al apps like Pay­pal, cus­tomers would then be able to top up their ac­counts via their bank ac­counts for use.

“Once you ver­i­fy that ac­count, then you can use your lo­cal ac­count to top up and with­draw,” said the PESH Mon­ey founder.

For­tuné al­so ex­plained he pushed for a tru­ly pa­per­less app to re­duce wastage in T&T as well.

“We don’t have an agent. You can’t go get a vouch­er. We’re not ac­cept­ing cash. It is tru­ly cash­less. And it’s tru­ly pa­per­less.

“And the rea­son why pa­per­less is im­por­tant is that T&T has a lot of prob­lems with lit­ter and garbage and waste. So it’s re­al­ly im­por­tant for us to re­al­ly have a pa­per­less sys­tem,” said For­tuné.

He al­so en­vi­sioned the ser­vice would be a great aid to peo­ple who have to send mon­ey in emer­gen­cies of­ten seen in the coun­try.

“Now what if you live in south Trinidad and you have some­one in Ari­ma that you need to get mon­ey to like your grand­moth­er or an aunt or some­thing like that? That’s as well where ser­vices like dig­i­tal wal­lets come in­to play. Be­cause you don’t have to phys­i­cal­ly hand them the cash, right? You could use your phone and send them that mon­ey and then they could with­draw it to the bank and what have you,” he said.

Cur­rent­ly, the com­pa­ny is reg­is­tered as an e-mon­ey is­suer for small to mid-val­ue trans­ac­tions, which means that PESH wal­lets can on­ly pay out up to $1,000 per trans­ac­tion with a month­ly trans­ac­tion lim­it and wal­let ca­pac­i­ty of $20,000.

He said the com­pa­ny was aim­ing to cov­er in­di­vid­u­als who seek to use e-mon­ey ser­vices to cov­er sim­ple, day-to-day ac­tiv­i­ties.

“It’s re­al­ly to fa­cil­i­tate those small trans­ac­tions, you’re at a lime, you know some­body or­gan­is­ing the lime and you say I will cov­er the food and every­thing, I’ll cov­er the bill you all will just pay me back on PESH,” said For­tuné, “Those sort of small every­day trans­ac­tions that we do on a dai­ly ba­sis. Those are the per­fect use cas­es for PESH.”

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny’s web­site: “PESH is what your granny called small change.”

The com­pa­ny is al­so small-scale in size, cur­rent­ly op­er­at­ing with five di­rec­tors.

For­tuné ad­mit­ted that cash was still very much king in the coun­try, but he hoped that there would be greater ac­cep­tance of e-mon­ey to com­ple­ment the use of cash.

“I am very hope­ful that T&T would start adopt­ing some of these ser­vices. The rea­son be­ing is that we’re very used to how things have been right. Trinidad is a very cash-heavy so­ci­ety, which is fine. I don’t be­lieve that dig­i­tal wal­lets and dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy would re­place cash. But it is an­oth­er tool and a lot of the talk around it is like they want to re­place cash,” said For­tuné.

A cou­ple of days af­ter be­ing is­sued their per­mit, TSTT an­nounced plans to roll out their dig­i­tal wal­let, PAYPR in March.

While their web­site and so­cial me­dia pages are now up, PESH Mon­ey is not quite ready for roll-out just yet.

The com­pa­ny has test­ed and even pre­sent­ed its app to the Cen­tral Bank, but it is not yet avail­able to the pub­lic as the com­pa­ny is still to re­ceive clear­ance from the Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit to op­er­ate.

For­tuné said that the ap­pli­ca­tion is in progress and PESH Mon­ey should be an op­tion for T&T lat­er this year.