Peppermint Innovation Ltd (ASX: PIL) has signed a strategic Merchant Biller Agreement with the Philippines’ largest and leading micro-financial services provider, Cebuana Lhuillier.
The agreement, which allows bizmoto agents to “cash-in” money at any one of Cebuana’s 2,500 shop fronts and accredited stories nationwide, will enable agents to ‘top-up’ their mobile wallets instantly, allowing them the ability to transact with more customers.
Essentially, a bizmoto agent will be able to enter any Cebuana branch, choose the bizmoto platform to top-up their mobile wallet and their ‘cash-in’ funds will instantly be credited to their bizmoto wallet.
Managing Director and CEO Chris Kain said the significant increase in the number of physical “cash-in” locations for bizmoto agents comes just weeks after Peppermint signed an online “cash-in” agreement with the Bank of the Philippines (BPI).
Under the BPI agreement, bizmoto agents who are BPI account holders will be able to instantly ‘top- up’ their mobile wallet, allowing them to service more customers because they can transact online in real time without the need to visit a BPI branch or automatic teller machine.
The Cebuana Merchant Biller agreement does not earn direct revenue for the company, however Peppermint does earn a fee every time a bizmoto agent performs a transaction utilising the bizmoto platform, which requires a positive balance on the bizmoto agents’ mobile wallet.
Cebuana will earn a fee when bizmoto agents “cash-in” money to ‘top-up’ their mobile wallets at any one of Cebuana’s 2,500 shop fronts and accredited stories nationwide. The agreement is for an initial one-year term which renews automatically unless either party give the other 30 days’ notice not to renew.
This agreement with Cebuana significantly increases our geographic spread for ‘cash-in’ points for our bizmoto agents, making it convenient and more accessible for our bizmoto agents to ‘cash-in’ to their mobile wallets,” Mr Kain said.
“It is yet another ‘brick in the road’ as we build out our bizmoto ecosystem, further integrating our bizmoto platform into the established Philippines’ payments industry as we seek interoperability across the digital payments landscape throughout the Philippines.
“The Cebuana agreement also extends Peppermint’s business alignment and partnership with the Philippine’s largest and leading micro-financial services provider and follows our bizmoProtect distribution and micro-insurance product offering announced in early March 2021.
“Peppermint aims to continue to align itself with strategic and established partners across the Philippines’ payments landscape to ensure the bizmoto platform and ecosystem of services is convenient and accessible to as many Filipino people as possible.”
Cebuana Lhuillier is the Philippines’ leading and largest micro-financial services provider specialising in pawning, remittance, micro-insurance and micro-savings. As of last year, Cebuana Lhuillier had reached more than four million micro savings account holders with over 30 million clients through Its more than 2,500 branches with 20,000 domestic partners and 1.7 million physical and virtual touchpoints. It has a long history in the Philippines dating back to the arrival of Frenchman Henry Lhuillier who opened the first Agencia Cebuana in Cebu in 1953.