Above: Aldwyn Wayne at WiPay’s Trinidad offices in February, 2021. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.

BitDepth#1358 for June 13, 2022.

At the 11th meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Finance and Legal Affairs held on May 27, the lines were drawn rather boldly in the sand.

There were the stakeholders supporting an orderly, careful entry into financial technology and there was…WiPay., represented by Aldwyn Wayne, who offered pointed examples of the value of moving forward with fintech more briskly.

WiPay currently facilitates tens of millions of TT transactions and hundreds of millions across the Caribbean.

By the end of the Second Public Hearing on the implementation of a regulatory framework for the development of financial technology, chairman Hazel Thompson-Ahye declared herself disappointed with the decision by WiPay to relocate its head office to Jamaica.

Maria Daniel, president of the Fintech Association noted earlier that, “We need to be a little quicker with legislative changes.”

“If we take as long as we did for the insurance act to pass, we will be a hundred years behind the rest of the world in the fintech space,” she warned.

“We need to have regulations that support as well as protect. We need to get government to be a user of these services.”

“This is an ecosystem. We have to have merchants and we have to have customers, we have to have players to be effective.”

Both Daniel and John Outridge, CEO of the TT International Financial Centre (IFC) agreed that there is a problem that traditional banking isn’t solving.

Daniel called for a single unique national ID, which she believes will solve problems associated with meeting the requirements of Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations, arguing that it was one of the foundations that are necessary for a cashless society.

Daniel noted that the country is more underbanked than it is unbanked, with many customers of the banking system having access to accounts, but not all the services of the banking system.

“There is a need to understand whether people are unbanked by choice or because they cannot get into the system. I don’t think another survey will tell us anything that we don’t already know.”

According to Outridge, the IFC is planning a survey to evaluate digital inclusion, but it’s unclear why. He also acknowledged that there are coordination problems among fintech stakeholders and the IFC it is still to develop a roadmap for the implementation of fintech.

The IFC wants to find out why people outside the sector are not able to participate or may not have trust in the banking system, but does the organisation really need a survey to confirm the onerous requirements for opening a bank account and the earned level of distrust and disdain of banking customers?

That disconnect seemed to drift right down to his inability to articulate any specific enthusiasm by the state for implementing fintech solutions.

According to Outridge, the participation of the government in fintech is being limited by legislative issues.

The IFC has spent the last five months driving the amendment of the Exchequer and Audit Act, which is described as a key piece of legislation that governs how the state receives money.

“You have to have procedures and processes that have to move from a manual model, handling cash and sending it to the Central Bank, to a completely new operating model.”

“You have to have legislation to instruct the Accounting Officer on the processes and controls that you need to have in place internally. There were not financial instructions in place to deal with these new payment methods.”

WiPay’s Aldwyn Wayne noted that WiPay’s alimony solution for the Judiciary, Courtpay was introduced in 2018 and has 40,000 users.

The 2020 expansion of Courtpay was frozen when the Treasury created a new rule that a bank must provide this service and it cannot be run via a Judiciary bank account.

“WiPay has been blocked every single step of the way but we have great adoption because we fixed problems,” Wayne said.

“Since then, we have rolled out in the countries of Grenada, Jamaica, Guyana, four versions of the same thing. Right there you see the problem. We have a working solution but then the red tape steps in.”

“Courtpay works, but you have to figure out some legislation for version two? It’s just a different bank account. It’s the same procedure that hasn’t failed.”

“They use intervention to slow down progress in Trinidad and Tobago. It has nothing to do with infrastructure. We have fantastic infrastructure. The bureaucracy is the problem. Courtpay works.”

“It’s not going forward because there is an agenda. The Ministry of finance should not be getting involved in technical decisions. Manage money, not technology.”

Stepping into what he described as “a very interactive discussion,” Keith Scotland sought to cut through the govspeak offered up by John Outridge (Live audio in the narration).

The following exchange was particularly illuminating.
KS: “Can I ask, and I want a very crisp answer, which segments of the society have been identified as being in need of financial inclusion?”
JO: “We don’t have the deep data of specific segments, where we are starting from is we do have a good sense of people who are not in the financial infrastructure.”
KS: “Without the knowledge, how then can we (identify) the potential target group? We are not being scientific. How? How? Have we identified any segments of society which are least prepared to make a transition to a cashless society? Please say yes.”
JO: “Yes it’s our focus, but I can’t tell you that we have identified the key segment.”