These are interesting times in the Latin American region. Below are some of the latest headlines and highlights:
- On the regulatory front, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Bolivia have introduced regulation for the provision of mobile financial services paving the way for the launch of new services in these countries. Likewise, Peru pledged at the last AFI Global Policy Forum last month to enact a new law regulating e-money within the next year.
- Banco Davivienda in Colombia launched an m-wallet called Daviplata earlier this year. The service has signed up over 500.000 users and processed over 3,000,000 transactions since its launch in January. It allows banked and unbanked customers to do P2P, airtime top-up, bill payments, and card-less cash out via any of their ATMs.
- América Móvil and Citi have officially launched “Transfer”, their $50m joint venture. American Movil is Latin America’s leading telecom group present in over 18 markets and with more than 225 million customers. America Movil’s ambitious plan is to get 15% of its subscriber base to use “Transfer” and will initially offer the service to clients of Citi’s Mexican subsidiary, Banamex. Transfer will enable customers to open bank accounts, transfer money, and withdraw cash from ATMs along with bill and merchant payments.
- MasterCard and Telefónica/Movistar announced a similar JV earlier in the year to launch mobile financial services in 12 markets.
- Tigo Millicom has launched its OTC Giros Tigo/ Tigo Money” in 4 markets (Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras). Bolivia is scheduled to launch next.
- Paggo in Brazil is now co-owned by Cielo and Banco do Brasil. This new position improves their capability of launching a full service m-wallet by integrating it to over a million acquiring points of the Cielo network (which is also owned by Bradesco and Banco do Brasil)
- Over in Haiti, Voila’s T-Cash has been awarded the ‘Scale Award’ from the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative (HMMI), a partnership between The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. The results since May show that there are currently over 300,000 registered T-Cash users who have conducted over 3 million financial transactions on their Voila phones to make or receive cash deposits, withdraw funds, purchase food and supplies or transfer money to friends or family. Voila has built up a network of over 1100 T-Cash agents and merchants throughout Haiti, with plans to scale up to 1500 by the end of the year.