"There are 65 per cent of peo­ple in the Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean Re­gion that are un­banked."These were the words of Mario Perez, Jr, vice-pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of Mas­ter­Card World­wide, in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian last week.Perez was in T&T with An­dres Gon­za­lez, vice-pres­i­dent, busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, East­ern Caribbean, Mas­ter­Card World­wide, to en­gage in their quar­ter­ly dis­cus­sions with fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions on sev­er­al mat­ters.

One of those ar­eas will be to de­cifer how the com­pa­ny can make cheques and cash an an­cient method of pay­ment.Perez ad­mit­ted that Mas­ter­Card's biggest com­pe­ti­tion is not an­oth­er cred­it card com­pa­ny, but rather to re­duce the amount of per­sons in the re­gion he is re­spon­si­ble for trans­fer­ring mil­lions of dol­lars, us­ing cheques and cash to con­duct busi­ness. An­oth­er item on the agen­da would be to en­cour­age bankers to join Mas­ter­Card World­wide in get­ting as much mo­bile in­dus­try space as pos­si­ble.

Mas­ter­Card has al­ready joined hands with Telef&oa­cute;nica, SA, a Span­ish broad­band and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider in Eu­rope and Latin Amer­i­ca, in mak­ing this step a re­al­i­ty. "While on­line bank­ing is al­ready in place, once a per­son has a smart­phone, they will be able to down­load ap­pli­ca­tions that would make their bank­ing ex­pe­ri­ence even more plea­sur­able, as they will be able to con­duct busi­ness in its fullest ca­pac­i­ty"

In­dia is al­ready mak­ing this new age move a re­al­i­ty.While many cit­i­zens en­joy the ben­e­fits of us­ing their cred­it cards, Perez said, " We are man­dat­ed to en­sure that by 2012, every is­suer must have a Eu­ro­pay Mas­ter­Card Visa (EMV) smart chip at­tached to their cred­it card. He said cred­it card com­pa­nies were hit on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions, but with the EMV, it would make it dif­fi­cult for fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ty. The EMV is an­oth­er se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure that will be added to the cred­it card, much like the se­cu­ri­ty code at the back of cred­it cards.

Many T&T con­sumers have com­plained of be­ing un­able to make on­line cred­it card pur­chas­es from many mer­chants, es­pe­cial­ly in the Unit­ed States. This phe­nom­e­non has brought a lev­el of frus­tra­tion not on­ly to lo­cals, but many cred­it card users world­wide."We are full aware of the prob­lem, but the onus is on the mer­chants to de­cide whether they want to ac­cept your busi­ness.If it were a face-to-face, there would be no prob­lem, but since it is an on­line trans­ac­tion, the risk to the mer­chant in­creas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly and they must de­cide whether they want to ac­cept those risks or not," he stat­ed.

Perez said that with the EMV, mer­chants would be more will­ing to ac­cept on­line pay­ments.The two Mas­ter­Card ex­ec­u­tives ar­rived in T&T last week Mon­day. Their first stop was at Bish­op Anstey High School East at Trinci­ty, as part of Mas­ter­Card's in­volve­ment in the Ju­nior Achieve­ment (JA) pro­gramme. The cred­it card com­pa­ny has had a long­stand­ing re­la­tion­ship with JA in many mar­kets through­out the re­gion.

Smart Con­sumer, to­geth­er with JA, is look­ing to em­pow­er young peo­ple to "own" their eco­nom­ic suc­cess through a pro­gramme de­signed to equip them with the knowl­edge to meet these ex­pec­ta­tions.This year, Mas­ter­Card has im­ple­ment­ed a re­gion wide pro­gramme, to­geth­er with JA, where they will be con­duct­ing "JA in a Day" ac­tiv­i­ties in ten mar­ket­ing coun­tries through­out Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

Bish­ops Anstey High's Form Five stu­dents was the first of these mar­kets.