BitDepth#1358

MARK LYNDERSAY

AT THE 11th meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Finance and Legal Affairs 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.

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, "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 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 co-ordination problems among fintech stakeholders and the IFC 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 opera