Mas­ter­card’s coun­try man­ag­er for Ja­maica, T&T, Bar­ba­dos and the East­ern Caribbean, Dal­ton Fowles, is com­mend­ing this coun­try’s Cen­tral Bank for do­ing a “pret­ty good job” in grant­i­ng Elec­tron­ic Mon­ey Is­suer (EMI) li­cences, which con­tin­ue to pave the way for T&T’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian at the 13th edi­tion of Mas­ter­card’s flag­ship In­no­va­tion Fo­rum which took place last week in Mi­a­mi, Fowles said while T&T may still be “a lit­tle be­hind,” this con­tin­u­ous move by the Cen­tral Bank will gen­er­ate “lots of in­ter­est and lots of fin­tecs sort of spin­ning up and quite a bit of en­gage­ment as well.”

“A lot of these projects take time. They are tech­ni­cal and ex­treme­ly com­plex be­tween the reg­u­la­tions in the lo­cal and ob­vi­ous­ly Mas­ter­card in terms of our com­pli­ance...so it takes some time but I would say all the right pieces are in place.The reg­u­la­tors recog­nise the need to digi­tise the econ­o­my so they are grant­i­ng EMI li­cences,” he ex­plained.

Fowles’ re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is to over­sees Mas­ter­card’s strat­e­gy to en­hance mar­ket prox­im­i­ty and stream­line op­er­a­tions.

Orig­i­nal­ly from Kingston, he al­so has ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in bank­ing and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, spe­cial­is­ing in pay­ments, dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture, dig­i­tal wal­lets, mo­bile and on­line bank­ing, and oth­er dig­i­tal self-ser­vice chan­nels.

In its lat­est an­nounce­ment on De­cem­ber 1, 2024, the Cen­tral Bank of T&T said it is­sued a pro­vi­sion­al reg­is­tra­tion to WamNow Tech­nolo­gies Ltd (WamNow), which au­tho­ris­es the pri­vate­ly owned fi­nan­cial tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, in­cor­po­rat­ed on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2021, to is­sue elec­tron­ic mon­ey (e-mon­ey) in this coun­try for a six-month pe­ri­od.

Un­der the terms of the pro­vi­sion­al reg­is­tra­tion, WamNow will be al­lowed to en­list new cus­tomers in a con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment mon­i­tored by the Cen­tral Bank.

This comes on the heels of the an­nounce­ment by the Cen­tral Bank that it is in the process of rolling out a mo­bile-to-mo­bile, fast pay­ments sys­tem along the lines of In­dia’s Uni­fied Pay­ments In­ter­face (UPI).

Re­gard­ing the us­age of cred­it card and how does this vary among Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos and T&T, Fowles said as a “rule of thumb” Mas­ter­card does not gen­er­al­ly dis­close mar­ket share in­for­ma­tion but not­ed that some mar­kets vary.

“It’s not like a one size fit all. Dif­fer­ent mar­kets have dif­fer­ent sorts of pen­e­tra­tion,” he added.

Asked in which of the three coun­tries is cred­it card us­age grow­ing the fastest, Fowles iden­ti­fied this as Ja­maica stat­ing that coun­try has had “prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant growth year-over-year and over the last cou­ple of years in terms of cred­it card growth.”

He added that while T&T re­mains a pre­dom­i­nant­ly a deb­it mar­ket, dig­i­tal pay­ments have been in­creas­ing.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing Fowles said there has been a “more sec­u­lar shift” in terms of dig­i­tal pay­ments whether it is from the card or wal­let, not­ing that growth has been “tremen­dous,” reg­is­ter­ing around 24 per cent year-over-year in the re­gion.

Last month, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said there had been a 50 per cent hike in the use of cred­it cards in the last five years.

Asked whether this was re­flect­ed in Mas­ter­card’s num­bers, Fowles said, “Peo­ple’s gen­er­al pref­er­ence for pay­ment is no longer cash and as a re­sult you are go­ing to see a con­tin­ued growth and this is where we talk about the sec­u­lar shift be­cause con­sumers are very com­fort­able...so we are go­ing to con­tin­ue to see that growth in dig­i­tal pay­ments.”

On dig­i­tal adop­tion in the re­gion, Fowles de­scribed the Caribbean as be­ing “a lit­tle be­hind” as op­posed to some of the larg­er mar­kets in the Latin Amer­i­can re­gion.

He iden­ti­fied “at­trac­tive­ness” as one of the chal­lenges for the Caribbean, not­ing that the ma­jor fin­tec play­ers for ex­am­ple, typ­i­cal­ly pre­fer go­ing to the larg­er mar­ket like Mex­i­co, the Brazil and Colom­bia.

“So mak­ing the Caribbean ex­treme­ly at­trac­tive we have had to sort of change the nar­ra­tive. We are hav­ing quite a bit of con­ver­sa­tions in­ter­nal­ly be­cause what hap­pens is we think about the Caribbean in its to­tal­i­ty. If you in­clude Dutch, French, Span­ish and Eng­lish, it is a US$450-bil­lion econ­o­my which is sig­nif­i­cant. So we change that nar­ra­tive when we en­gage the ma­jor play­ers that they need to see the Caribbean with­in that con­text,” Fowles ex­plained.

He not­ed that Mas­ter­card, as part of its con­ver­sa­tion go­ing for­ward, is look­ing at in­tro­duc­ing a frame­work that would make the cost of ac­cep­tance a lot cheap­er.

“We want to digi­tise the en­tire ecosys­tem. For ex­am­ple, the guy at the side of the road who is sell­ing dou­bles, he needs to be part of that in­clu­sive growth frame­work. But it takes more than just a net­work and a dig­i­tal en­able­ment. It al­so re­quires con­ver­sa­tions with the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions,” he added, not­ing that such a frame­work can be gen­er­al­ly ap­plied.

In shar­ing some ad­vice as to how T&T can boost its dig­i­tal nar­ra­tive even more, Fowles stressed that dig­i­tal and fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion are im­por­tant as well as in­clu­sive growth.

This, he said, al­so en­tails mak­ing sure peo­ple “at the bot­tom” have ac­cess to cred­it, adding that he felt very con­fi­dent there is a clear un­der­stand­ing of what is re­quired and ef­forts are tak­ing place by T&T to move the dis­cus­sions in the right di­rec­tion.

Mean­while, Mayra Vi­vac­qua Mas­ter­card’s clus­ter lead for the Caribbean, who high­light­ed in­sights on the com­pa­ny’s work in build­ing trust, ex­plained that ini­tia­tives con­tin­ue with part­ners in­clud­ing gov­ern­ments, fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions and fin­tecs to dri­ve more ed­u­ca­tion around the digi­ti­sa­tion of the econ­o­my and the fi­nan­cial health of the whole ecosys­tem.

“There are a cou­ple of things we un­der­stand that con­sumers are wor­ried about. For ex­am­ple, they be­lieve that just by walk­ing across a ter­mi­nal, if they have a con­tact­less card it will make a trans­ac­tions. Those are the things we need to de­mys­ti­fy as that is not the case.

“But I would say it is con­tin­u­ous ef­fort in terms of ex­plain­ing to them how dig­i­tal ca­pa­bil­i­ties ac­tu­al­ly en­hance their con­sumer ex­pe­ri­ence that at the end of the day, we will dri­ve safe, se­cure and seam­less trans­ac­tions,” said Vi­vac­qua, whose port­fo­lio is fo­cussed on dri­ving the re­gion’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, en­sur­ing that all Caribbean cit­i­zens have ac­cess to, and ben­e­fit from, the dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

As it per­tains to what is Mas­ter­card do­ing to re­duce cred­it card cost, Vi­vac­qua said, “It is an ecosys­tem play. It is not just on Mas­ter­card to do that. We have over the last cou­ple of years al­ways looked at op­por­tu­ni­ties of low­er­ing our cost of ac­cep­tance es­pe­cial­ly for the nano and mi­cro mer­chants. This are an on­go­ing ef­forts and it is show­ing re­sults as we see the growth of ac­cep­tance in the re­gion.”

Re­gard­ing plans and tips for the Caribbean for 2025, she em­pha­sised there are def­i­nite­ly av­enues to con­tin­ue push­ing for fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion, pro­vid­ing bet­ter con­sumer ex­pe­ri­ence as well as safe, se­cure pay­ment ex­pe­ri­ences and to en­able a sys­tem that in­cludes con­sumers and small mer­chants and more im­por­tant­ly the growth of the lo­cal econ­o­my.

“It’s a dy­nam­ic re­gion. There is a lot hap­pen­ing. It’s a very di­verse mar­ket. There is no way we can treat the Caribbean as one sin­gle mar­ket. There are dif­fer­ent re­al­i­ties, dif­fer­ent stages of de­vel­op­ment and op­por­tu­ni­ty,” Vi­vac­qua em­pha­sised.