WiPay to drive regional expansion from new base in Ja

With three years of operation under its belt, and an estimated US$210 million in annual transactions, payment facilitator WiPay Caribbean is expanding its footprint in Jamaica, with an eye on further market penetration, regionally, including retailing central bank-backed digital currencies, or CBDCs, here and in the Eastern Caribbean.

From its initial base in Trinidad & Trinidad, WiPay built out the business in areas such as Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia and St Kitts, as well as Guyana and Suriname on the South American mainland.

Now the company has decided to relocate its headquarters to Jamaica as it shifts its focus northwards. From leased premises encompassing three floors at Grenada Crescent in New Kingston, it plans to launch the offices next week and announce a concerted push into the north of the region, including the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

From there, WiPay Caribbean CEO Aldwyn Wayne says the next stop is expected to be areas of Central America that have not been named.

Already, the payment aggregator that targets businesses seeking to cash in on e-commerce, with payments going directly to their local bank accounts, has an application in at Bank of Jamaica, BOJ, seeking approval to participate in the CBDC pilot now under way.

It also wants approval as a wallet provider in the central bank’s so-called sandbox of fintech companies and if approved, is expected to provide CBDC payment services, with registered clients utilising their mobile phone to receive CBDC top-up and make payments without the need for a bank account.

In preparation for the big move to CBDC and other more sophisticated payment systems, WiPay has ended its initial partnership with Lasco Financial Services Limited and is now said to be a BOJ-regulated payment provider operating under the banking regulations as a fintech partner of First Global Bank, its new financial services collaborator since December last year.

“Lasco is a quasi-financial institution regulated with the BOJ, it is not a full financial institution. WiPay is a Mastercard partner company, and as such, with some of the solutions we provide, we needed a full bank. So, in the early days we worked with Lasco Financial, but we had to pivot to a bank because we needed more regulated services under our belt,” Wayne told the Financial Gleaner in an interview this week.

“What we applied to the central bank to do is that our solution will help with the distribution and management of a network for CBDCs,” Wayne said, noting that WiPay was the only licensed and regulated payment facilitator operating in the Caribbean. Its competitors include overseas-based PayPal and Stripe.

WiPay’s bid to be part of the CBDC retail network backed by the central bank’s imprimatur, comes on the heels of the company’s recent inking of a deal with the Government of Grenada for a digital fiat under the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States/Eastern Caribbean Central Bank CBDC, named DCash. The arrangement allows for WiPay to provide a mobile phone-based network for the distribution and redeeming of cash value benefits under the country’s Support for Education, Empowerment and Development social programme.

WiPay has been part of similar cashless arrangements in Jamaica as the Government has sought digital solutions compatible with its movement and gathering restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These included participation in the development and implementation of the initial phase of Jamaica’s E-Commerce National Delivery System, or ENDS, and a cashless system for farmers’ markets operated by the Rural Agricultural Development Authority.

WiPay is about to implement a social programme in which it is using its own money from a US$1-million Caribbean digitisation fund to provide grants to Jamaicans, with the project being administered by charity organisation Food for the Poor. The roll-out is expected to start in the South West St Elizabeth constituency of Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Floyd Green, with eventual expansion across the country. The grant benefits will be redeemed for recipients by a range of participating businesses.

The grant programme is part of the WiPay Jamaica launch marketing activities, and is expected to help expand the company’s footprint in the country with the sign-up of businesses that, thereafter, will be part of the WiPay payment network participating in further payment solutions and services.

WiPay Jamaica Country Manager Kibwe McGann is reporting that at pre-launch and with no advertising to date, business take-up is running ahead of expectations. Some 3,000 business and service operators are said to be using the platform to process payments. This compares with some 40,000 users in Trinidad built up over the past three years of operations there.

WiPay is said to be doing 50,000 online transactions per day, not including its Jamaica operations, which is said to have processed US$5 million in online transactions over the past six months.

huntley.medley@gleanerjm.com