NATIONAL Commercial Bank (NCB) Jamaica limited, which has been chosen to undertake the pilot project to provide electronic mobile payments of benefits under the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) with the bank’s mobile money platform, NCB Quisk, will roll out its pilot programme next month.
“The use of NCB Quisk will remove the overhead that the Government would have had to pay to prepare and disburse cheques,” a news release from Quisk quotes NCB’s product development officer, mobile payments, Stephen Scale.
“Potentially this could be savings of millions of dollars per year. It will also reduce the time required to get payments to beneficiaries and save them from having to visit an office to obtain funds. On the side of the beneficiaries, they will have immediate access to funds once passed to their NCB Quisk account,” Scale explained, adding that the January roll-out will involve 500 beneficiaries.
At present, PATH beneficiaries are paid by a combination of cheques and debit cards, but the Government is now seeking to improve efficiencies under the programme, while enabling beneficiaries to have better access to and easy retrieval of their funds.
“Customers will be instantly notified by SMS the moment they receive payments directly to their mobile account,” Scale said. “Thereafter, they can start doing transactions such as general purchases at participating NCB merchants, transfers to dependents and other account holders, and very soon bill payment, and much more. The customer can safely conduct transactions, without walking with cash, or even without the mobile phone at NCB point- of-sale terminals. They also have 24/7 accessibility to NCB’s ABM network for not only withdrawals.”
He said that NCB’s main competitive advantage is the proliferation of convenient access points that will be available to PATH customers who use NCB Quisk.
“NCB has a network of 250 ABMs. NCB also has well over 10,000 merchant point- of-sale terminals which, over the next few months, will be equipped to accept Quisk payments,” Scale said, adding that at present no other bank or platform allows the range of transactions possible through NCB Quisk.
“NCB Quisk mobile money resides on a flexible, service-oriented architecture platform. This allows NCB Quisk to support a wide range of transaction types. Currently, NCB Quisk can be used for point-of-sale purchases, cash-in and cash-out, person-to-person transfers and bulk funding such as what is being done with PATH,” he said.
PATH is a conditional cash transfer programme funded by the Government of Jamaica and the World Bank and is aimed at delivering benefits by way of cash grants to the most needy and vulnerable in the society.
-Jamaica Observer