Perth-based fintech Peppermint Innovation has successfully launched a new, online international remittance business portal, Bizmoto.
In a statement to the ASX Peppermint said Bizmoto – which translates to “Your Business” in local Filipino language – would initially target the thousands of ex-pat Filipinos living in Australia who want an easy way to remit money to family and friends in the Philippines.
Peppermint Innovation Managing Director and CEO, Chris Kain, said theBizmoto portal was in a pilot phase, with the company aiming to leverage off its burgeoning mobile-banking platform in the Philippines before commercialising it across other major markets.
According to World Bank data, Australians transferred almost US$1 billion to the Philippines in 2016, out of a total of US$16.2 billion remitted around the globe,” Mr Kain said.
“We believe the Australian outward bound international remittance market represents a great opportunity for Peppermint to leverage our established Philippines commercial operations and diversify our revenue streams from existing and new customer bases.
“We are confident that our strategic approach, to put in place agreements with market leading providers, has allowed us to adopt a ‘best-of-breed’ system architecture.
“This positions the company well to take advantage of a more sophisticated and regulated market sector which is growing faster than GDP, but which is challenged by the current regulatory environment.”
Mr Kain said 70 per cent of Filipinos did not operate a bank account and non-bank funds remittance services such asBizmoto were a significant method of transferring money to and from families and between countries.
“For example, the value of international remittances to the Philippines in 2017 exceeded US$28 billion,” he said.
“We believe the growing up take of Peppermint’s mobile banking, remittance and payments technology platform in the Philippines provides us with an ideal marketing opportunity to promote the onlineBizmoto portal to the Filipino community.
“We will also continue to assess other potential opportunities to build on our international remittance business from Australia, looking to form strategic relationships with reciprocal rights to access other key remittance corridors from originating countries into the Philippines.”
Peppermint Innovation is an Australian company focused on the commercialisation and further development of the Peppermint Platform, a mobile banking, payments and remittance technology designed for banks, mobile money operators, credit card companies, non-bank agent networks and microfinance institutions. Peppermint currently operates the Peppermint Platform in the Philippines.
Peppermint has a particular focus in the developing world (starting with the Philippines) and on providing an attractive tool to the unbanked population to access mobile banking and remit money to and from family and others through a system not tied to a particular bank or telephony company.
