Rural banks rack up P15B in mobile deals

MANILA, Philippines - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said about P15 billion worth of mobile money-enabled transactions were processed by rural banks since 2004, when the US government pioneered early initiatives to help microenterprises gain access to financial services by using a mobile money approach.

The USAID said rural banks have processed more than 2.7 million mobile money transactions after the agency partnered with the government, rural banks and telecommunications operators in 2004

It would be recalled that President Aquino and USAID administrator Rajiv Shah announced the first full-scale mobile money project in the Philippines during a meeting in Washington last June 8.

Last Tuesday, USAID chief innovation officer and senior counselor to the administrator Dr. Maura O’Neill and USAID/Philippines mission director Gloria Steele launched the Scaling Innovations in Mobile Money (SIMM) project.

“This innovative partnership builds upon USAID/Philippines’ current interventions in microfinance and mobile banking to expand financial services even further through new technologies. It will enable Filipinos even from the remotest parts of the country to send money home, save money, pay for unexpected medical costs, school fees, or invest in their business using their mobile phones,” O’Neill said.

Steele explained that SIMM is based on partnerships with national and local government and the private sector that together would build and strengthen local components of the mobile money ecosystem in select pilot areas specifically for government services, electronic payroll distribution and payment systems.

“By offering a safe, cost-effective, and more convenient way of doing business, mobile money technology will provide an important tool to promote financial inclusion and transparency,” she added.

The project would help address some of the ‘binding constraints to economic growth’ identified under the Partnership for Growth signed in November 2011 by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario.

Tricia Dizon, department head of financial services of Smart Communications Inc., said in an interview with reporters that the unit of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) would actively participate in the project.

She pointed out that the company is looking at doubling the number of transactions of its 10 million active users of mobile money through Smart Money.

On the other hand, G-Xchange Inc. president Paolo Eugenio Baltao said the Philippines has one of the most progressive rules on the regulation of mobile money transactions in the whole world.

He said the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has been implementing progressive regulations when it comes to mobile money transactions.

According to him, the unit of Ayala-controlled Globe Telecom Inc. has about one million G Cash users all over the country.