Digicel to roll out e-money service in Jamaica

MOBILE NEWS –Digicel Jamaica plans to introduce a mobile money service, which will allow smartphone users to receive remittances and to make and receive payments via their cell phone, in a move designed to reach Jamaica’s unbanked population. “The banking of the unbanked is one of the key things,” Barry O’Brien, CEO for Digicel Jamaica, told Wednesday Business.

The move has been in the making since 2012 when Digicel signed a US$17 million financing arrangement with US mobile banking outfit, Boom Financial, in 2012, with a view to enter the Caribbean remittances market. Digicel has already launched the service in Haiti, where it is “quite a large business”, and to a lesser extent in Papua New Guinea in the Pacific, but is still working on getting approvals in the Jamaican market, O’Brien said. More