The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

A senior commercial bank official yesterday said “there is a huge opportunity” for start-ups and entrepreneurs to “fill the gaps” created by the switch to electronic payments.

Andrew Pike, Fidelity Bank (Bahamas) chief technology and operations officer, told the Central Bank’s second annual blockchain seminar that sectors such as bill aggregation were ripe for third-party vendors to develop their skills.

He acknowledged, though, that the Bahamian payments system still has much distance to travel in transitioning away from its traditional reliance on cash transactions to electronic and digital commerce.

“The majority of payments in The Bahamas are done by cash,” Mr Pike conceded. “The biggest challenge that we have is trying to move people away from cash and making payments online. The problem is that a lot of interfaces between the companies are still very manual. Ensuring an end-to-end system of making payments is critical.

“We may think the app is easy to use or that online banking is easy, but some of our customers are challenged with those. This week we will deploy tablets in the branches where persons can come in and play with our online app, play with online banking, even log in themselves and we can show them how to complete transactions.

“I think there is a huge opportunity for businesses such as bill aggregators. There is a huge opportunity for small start-ups to look at those spaces and fill the gaps. As a bank it’s very time consuming for us to go out to every vendor and build interfaces. If a third party would build it we would definitely buy it.”

Julian Rolle, managing director of Cash N’ Go, said digitisation can provide significant benefits to money transfer firms by improving how they collect money from customers and remit payments to vendors.

“When you live in New Providence, people take for granted that there are places you can go to pay for services,” he said. “When you go to the Out Islands it’s much more difficult.” Businesses “only have a certain window within the day during which they are able to do money transactions. We need to move cash securely from one location to the next”.