MANILA (Mindanao Examiner / Sept. 11, 2012) – The Philippines launched its first-ever full-scale mobile money project supported by the United States Agency for International Development.
The American Embassy in Manila said the Scaling Innovations in Mobile Money (SIMM) Project was first announced on June 8 during a meeting between President Benigno Aquino III and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah in Washington.
USAID Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator, Dr. Maura O’Neill, and USAID/Philippines Mission Director Gloria Steele, led the project launching along with Bank of the Philippine Islands-Globe BanKO President Teresita Tan, G-Xchange Inc. President Paolo Baltao, and Smart Communications Head of Financial Services Tricia Dizon.
The embassy, in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner, quoted O’Neill as saying: “This innovative partnership builds upon USAID/Philippines’ current interventions in microfinance and mobile banking to expand financial services even further through new technologies. It will enable Filipinos even from the remotest parts of the country to send money home, save money, pay for unexpected medical costs, school fees, or invest in their business using their mobile phones.”
It also quoted a 2011 Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas report that only 26 percent of Filipinos have access to formal financial services and that out of the 1,635 municipalities in the country, only 37 percent or 610 municipalities do not have access to banks.
The SIMM project takes advantage of the high penetration rate of mobile phone subscribers in the Philippines to close this gap and extend financial services to Filipinos anywhere in the archipelago, it said.
Steele explained that SIMM is based on partnerships with national and local government and the private sector that together will build and strengthen local components of the “mobile money ecosystem” in select pilot areas specifically for government services, electronic payroll distribution and payment systems.
“By offering a safe, cost-effective, and more convenient way of doing business, mobile money technology will provide an important tool to promote financial inclusion and transparency,” Steele said.
The project will help to address some of the binding constraints to economic growth identified under the Partnership for Growth, signed in November 2011 by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Albert del Rosario.
In 2004, USAID pioneered early initiatives to help microenterprises gain access to financial services by using a mobile money approach. Since that time, rural banks have processed more than 2.7 million mobile money-enabled transactions valued at over P15 billion.
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