Trinidad and To­ba­go and Ja­maica are among the first Caribbean coun­tries to ben­e­fit from a new part­ner­ship be­tween Mas­ter­card (the Amer­i­can multi­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial ser­vices cor­po­ra­tion) and Wi­Pay (the Caribbean’s lead­ing fin­tech com­pa­ny).

An of­fi­cial state­ment on the part­ner­ship is­sued by Mas­ter­card re­ports that the col­lab­o­ra­tion will bring sig­nif­i­cant gains for the re­gion in the form of “a se­cure pay­ments ecosys­tem”.

“Both com­pa­nies will col­lab­o­rate to dri­ve greater fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion in the is­lands through a suite of pay­ment and ac­cep­tance so­lu­tions,” the re­lease ex­plains.

As a part of the part­ner­ship, Wi­Pay will:

●     Lever­age Mas­ter­card’s Bank in the Box so­lu­tion to em­pow­er SMEs through card ac­cep­tance. Bank in the Box is an end to end so­lu­tion for SMEs that do not ac­cept card pay­ments and that are not fi­nan­cial­ly in­clud­ed;

●     Part­ner with a lo­cal fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion who will is­sue a Mas­ter­card pre­paid card, to strength­en lo­cal dig­i­tal ecosys­tems and fa­cil­i­tate seam­less, fast, and trans­par­ent dis­burse­ments of funds for SMEs and cit­i­zens.

●     Lever­age pay­ment so­lu­tions for gov­ern­ment pro­grams, in­clud­ing:

       − Court­Pay, to fa­cil­i­tate court main­te­nance dis­burse­ments such as child sup­port;

       − Gov­Pay, to fa­cil­i­tate pub­lic help ser­vices;

       − Dig­i­tal ID, EMV Card for Dig­i­tal Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and Dis­burse­ments.

Caribbean Di­vi­sion Pres­i­dent for Mas­ter­card, Marce­lo Tan­gioni, says the ce­ment­ing of the part­ner­ship is well-timed.

“We found in Wi­Pay a knowl­edge­able part­ner to bring our vi­sion to life and are ex­cit­ed to part­ner with them to bring these ro­bust so­lu­tions to the mar­ket,” he notes. “This im­por­tant part­ner­ship builds on our com­mit­ment to lead the jour­ney to­wards de­vel­op­ing smarter is­lands and cash­less so­ci­eties to strength­en economies and in­crease fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion through­out the re­gion.”

And Ald­wyn Wayne, Wi­Pay’s CEO, states:

“This part­ner­ship is huge for the Caribbean as it al­lows Wi­Pay to ac­cel­er­ate fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion by de­liv­er­ing in­no­v­a­tive fi­nan­cial prod­ucts to the un­banked and un­der­banked of the re­gion. On a macro lev­el, it en­ables WI­Pay’s re­gion­al set­tle­ment net­work to run on Mas­ter­card’s pay­ment rails, im­prov­ing the ease of do­ing busi­ness in the Caribbean, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the CARI­COM Sin­gle mar­ket and econ­o­my re­gion (CSME).”

The col­lab­o­ra­tive so­lu­tions will launch in Ja­maica and Trinidad & To­ba­go ini­tial­ly, with roll-outs in Grena­da, Guyana, Do­mini­ca, Bar­ba­dos, St. Kitts, St Lu­cia, St. Vin­cent, and in the Ba­hamas, among oth­ers in the near fu­ture.