On June 02, just a week after a fiery contribution to a Joint Select Committee hearing on fintech, WiPay’s Aldwyn Wayne held a press conference to announce his offer of a digital distribution system pilot for the Social Development Ministry. WiPay has delivered that document.
The proposal, delivered on June 08, 2022, outlines a fully digital system for identifying and tracking access to disbursements made to needy citizens and ensuring that the money is spent on what it is intended for.
Aldwyn Wayne confirmed that the documents that were leaked to me this week are authentic.
WiPay has proposed a proof of concept initiative, the Digital Disbursements Pilot Project, to last three months, which the company estimates is worth $1.2 million.
Funding for the project has been sourced from Colour Bank, a neobank that targets the Caribbean diaspora.
Colour Bank is an affiliate company of WiPay, established in the US with another board of directors. Colour Bank’s directors took the decision to appprove the grant at an extraordinary general meeting on June 01, 2022.
A neobank is a digital bank that does not have any branches and is usually deeply invested in fintech solutions.
WiPay hopes to develop, with the Trinidad government, a reliable, transparent and efficient way to deliver money to those in need while maintaining accountability for taxpayer money spent on these social support projects.
A Qure Covid19 Household Survey carried out in Trinidad and Tobago between May 04-09 found that the biggest complaint among families in need was the transaction process to access salary relief grants and food cards.
According to Assistant Auditor General Louis Hernandez, who spoke at a Public Accounts Committee meeting on June 08, analysis of the public grant delivery process showed little fraud, but record keeping of subventions in public assistance grants and other government spending was generally poor and sometimes nonexistent.
Inconsistencies included the issuing of 404 senior citizens’ grants totalling $1 million with no record of cheque numbers or bank account numbers.
This is not the first time that WiPay has made its digital transaction systems available locally for social support.
In March 2020, the company implemented a grant distribution system for the Living Waters Community.
Since then, WiPay’s systems have been used regionally by Jamaica’s Food for the Poor to deliver food grants and by that country’s Ministry of Labour and Social Security to deliver its Covid Assistance Cash grant to 10,000 beneficiaries and went on to use it for its Food Assistance Cash Grant for 20,000 Jamaicans.
Grenada’s Ministry of Social Development used the technology for its Support for Education, Empowerment & Development (SEED) Program for schoolbooks and uniforms.
Donna Cox, the Social Development Minister did not return a call to her cell phone and did not respond to a WhatsApp message sent seeking a response from the Ministry on the matter.
Calls to the Permanent Secretaries of the Social Development Ministry and to the ministry’s communications department went unanswered on its public-facing phone systems.
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