Mo­bile pay­ment so­lu­tions com­pa­ny, Wi­Pay, is plan­ning to launch the dig­i­tal app Colour which will al­low sev­er­al small busi­ness own­ers to have dig­i­tal pay­ment op­tions via smart phones and oth­er de­vices.

In a soft launch of the app at the Arazzi restau­rant in St. Clair on Wednes­day, Wi­Pay’s chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer, John Mol­len­thiel, ex­plained the app would al­low cus­tomers to scan a QR code which would fa­cil­i­tate them to send funds to pay a ven­dor, or mer­chant, through their mo­bile de­vice.

“Their phones to scan the code and en­ter their bank card de­tails on their de­vice, so there is no con­tact. The sec­ond thing we should say is how easy it is tap to pay. So my phone, this phone, your phone is ac­tu­al­ly a point-of-sale de­vice. It has that ca­pa­bil­i­ty,” said Mol­len­thiel.

Mol­len­thiel said the app could be es­pe­cial­ly help­ful for ven­dors in the cruise ship and Car­ni­val sea­son, as he not­ed that many times craft and food ven­dors have lost out on sales due to the lack of pay­ment op­tions avail­able to them. He ex­plained the app would be com­pat­i­ble with sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al banks and pay­ment plat­forms.

Al­so speak­ing at the event was dig­i­tal strate­gist Keron Rose, who re­cent­ly vis­it­ed Colom­bia where he ex­pe­ri­enced first hand the op­tion of be­ing able to pay for street food such as chur­ros us­ing dig­i­tal ap­pli­ca­tions. He not­ed that while there had been sev­er­al re­cent un­veil­ings of dig­i­tal wal­lets, the buy in had been slow.

Rose said the Colour card, which is al­so set to be in­tro­duced to the Trinidad mar­ket soon, would act as an ad­di­tion­al pro­tec­tion for con­sumers against fraud.

The card would al­low users to shop on­line us­ing funds from their bank ac­count or cred­it cards, while not ex­pos­ing their ac­count in­for­ma­tion to on­line web­sites hence re­duc­ing pos­si­ble in­stances of fraud.

“We want­ed to be able to use a card that would act like a fire wall. We could load a cred­it card or load this charge card and use that to shop on­line and in do­ing that, if that card ever gets com­pro­mised, we will just log in­to the colour app and turn off your colour card,” said Rose.

The app and the card are still pend­ing reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals from Cen­tral Bank.

Wi­Pay was found­ed in No­vem­ber 2017 by Point Fortin en­tre­pre­neur Ald­wyn Wayne. The com­pa­ny now op­er­ates through­out the Caribbean, in the US, Colom­bia and Ghana in West Africa.