Barbados’ national instant payment system, BiMPay, has officially gone live, enabling individuals, businesses, and government agencies to send and receive money instantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The system was launched at a ceremony on Friday night where Prime Minister Mia Mottley made the first live transaction, purchasing a burger from a local entrepreneur.
“When a country sleeps, it loses opportunity,” said Prime Minister Mottley moments after.
Calling it a proud moment for the country, she stated that persons would now be able to function, plan, and work in a seamless way.
Prime Minister Mia Mottley at the BiMPay Go-Live Pyjama Party with other officials
Noting that BiMPay was just one of the island’s new digital services to come on stream within the last few weeks, Mottley stated that in the upcoming months more will be done to bring Barbados fully into a digital framework.
“As I said with Pearly, I can pick up the phone and look and see and talk to anybody in Australia or wherever, and our citizens have come to understand, as is happening at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, that you can read X-rays, you can read CT scans. Right now, we have arrangements with India, where a lot of our backlog at the hospital has been able to be reduced significantly as a result of the engagement of additional skills.
“I keep saying that the one thing that keeps me up at night is the skills deficit in this country. We don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough people with skills. And therefore, to use technology to augment our capacity is what we are trying to do. And technology can also make it easier to do business at any time of day or night,” she said.
The prime minister added that the digital payment system would reduce crime opportunities and provide small businesses with a digital record to be able to access loans.
“We have done this for my friend, the shopkeeper in Northumberland. We have done this for the people who are fixing cars in Cave Hill. We have done this for the people who are itinerant vendors. We have done this for the coconut vendors. We have done this for all the people who otherwise either would find difficulty in being able to deal with transactions, who would be vulnerable in security situations, and who at the end of the day need to establish a record of credit with the financial institutions that they want to do,” she said
Central Bank of Barbados Governor Dr Kevin Greenidge (SB)
Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, Dr Kevin Greenidge, said the system had been in development for two years and would be expanded to among other things, ensure that all government agencies were included.
He said six commercial banks, three credit unions, the Barbados Stock Exchange, and the Accountant General’s Office are already on the system.
“A modern economy needs a modern payment system. People need to be able to send money quickly. Businesses need to be able to receive funds and have them available to spend. Vendors want to get their funds and access their money immediately.
They don’t want to miss a payment cause somebody ain’t got cash. That’s where we are. Families want to support each other and send some money to the child at university or send money to support each other. That’s what we need and we need a space to innovate to compete and to build the fintech industry that needs to be built,” he said.
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