KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica is in dialogue with several countries, including India as it looks for a unified platform that will facilitate an expansion in digital payments locally.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness made the disclosure on Thursday as he responded to questions about the level of mobile banking in Jamaica while addressing the ‘Recover Better Conference’ organised by the Consulate General of Jamaica in New York.

The conference was billed as a one-day, action-oriented forum focused on advancing Jamaica’s post-disaster recovery and resilience efforts.

Holness noted that the purpose of mobile payments is to combat the number of individuals who haveare “unbanked”.

The prime minister acknowledged that there are countries with lower gross domestic product than Jamaica, but which have more people who can be involved in digital payments, even where they do not possess a bank account.

“In Jamaica, we may have a higher per cent of banked but still not as high as we would want, but a low percentage of persons utilising digital payments. And that is the challenge,” he stated.

Holness noted that Jamaica was one of few countries in the world that has established a digital currency – “we have JAMDEX… but it has not taken off as we would like,” he admitted.

The prime minister explained that a part of the challenge was the banking system being willing to fully rollout what would be necessary to support digital systems.

“So you would need for example point-of-sale machines and the various [bank] cards and all that is required. That is a significant expenditure footprint that banks would have to undertake,” he said.

“The other challenge is to establish a unified platform because we wouldn’t want to have just one payment system, you want to have many payment systems but you need to have a unified platform on which the payment systems can exchange,” Holness added.

He then revealed that, “We have started discussions with countries such as India about using their unified platform so we’re in dialogue with that”.

The prime minister noted that Jamaica already has a system that connects all automated banking machines but said that it may need additional investment, “and so we’re in dialogue with the banks to expand that and make that more available”.

He also pointed to the Bank of Jamaica creating a sandbox where digital mobile payment systems can get approvals, however, he said, the process has been slow.

—            Lynford Simpson