‘Electronic payments will grow the economy’

Jamaica is the fastest-growing market in the Caribbean as it relates to digital transactions and with ambition to become market leaders, Mastercard said they are here investing heavily.

“There is something already happening here in this market and it’s not A or B that is driving that transformation, I think it’s the whole industry, the whole eco system that is starting to get ready for that,” said Caribbean Division President for Mastercard, Marcelo Tangioni.

He was speaking at a press conference recently to signal the opening of Mastercard’s new office in New Kingston.

Last year, a Gleaner article revealed a Mastercard study which showed that almost 80 per cent of all transactions conducted in Jamaica are done using cash. The study explained that the country’s economy can grow by 0.7 per cent if Jamaicans increased electronic payments by 30 per cent in a four-year period.

“Debit is the fastest-growing payment method in that particular space, so that’s the area that I see the biggest opportunity for this country, because a lot of Jamaicans, if they don’t have a debit card they cannot transact on the online environment,” said Tangioni.

The Mastercard executive said that millennials were the demographic that is gravitating more to debit card usage.

Earlier this year, The Gleaner reported that domestic banks and other financial institutions haemorrhage $750 million in 2017 owing to fraud.

“A debit account is much more sensitive than a credit account. If you have fraud, it’s your credit limit if you have debit, it’s your money, so what we did, we completely change the value proposition of our debit products.”

Mastercard Jamaica Country Manager Dalton Fowles was quizzed as to whether consumers were using cards less because there’s a trust issue with banks.

“In the Jamaican landscape we may have about 450,000 credit cards, but we have over two million debit products. The reason why PCE (personal consumer expenditure) on debit is low is simply because the debit solutions does not allow them to do digital transactions.

“I don’t believe the consumers are not doing digital transactions because they don’t trust the bank; but to get there, our partner banks will have to develop varying approaches to convince those customers to begin to trust them and trust the solutions they are putting in the market,” said Fowles.