Utiba Pte., a pioneer and global leader in mobile financial transaction software, announced today that its affiliate for the Americas, Utiba Americas, has won the RFP process for the mobile wallet project of the Central Bank of Ecuador.
The Central Bank of Ecuador thoroughly researched successful mobile money projects and deployments worldwide, and based upon their investigation, drew up strict technical pre-qualifications for its mobile money program.
Ecuador, like many Latin American countries, has seen the penetration of mobile phone services explode in the past decade, reaching a staggering 103% of the population in 2011. The majority of inhabitants, however, still do not have access to a bank account. Noting the success of global mobile money projects in reaching and helping so called "bottom of the pyramid," low income segments of society, the Central Bank launched an investigation into successful deployments to identify and incorporate global best practices into their project.
The Ecuadorian mobile financial services project will provide all inhabitants with a mobile wallet for storing, sending and receiving money. The system will operate throughout the entire country, using cellular service from any one of the three mobile network operators present in Ecuador, and can integrate all financial institutions as they are already connected to the Central Bank of Ecuador.
"The mobile money project is a key initiative for the Government of Ecuador to accelerate financial inclusion and we are pleased to have Utiba Americas as our technology partner to enable this project," mentioned Santiago Vasquez, Central Bank of Ecuador's Mobile Financial Services Program Director.
The project will evolve to integrate with the new national ID system to enable the new contactless and intelligent national ID card as a method of payment funded from the mobile wallet. For this project, Utiba Americas will provide the Utiba Mobility mobile financial services platform on a hosted basis, which will allow the Central Bank to focus on the design, deployment, and testing of services, as well as the commercial coordination for the successful launch of each of them. "Once we understood the full vision of the Central Bank of Ecuador and their plan to use mobile money as a catalyst for financial inclusion of all segments of Ecuadorian society, we were eager to take part and to lend our global deployment experience and the unique capabilities of the Utiba Mobility platform," said Jesus Luzardo, Utiba Americas' Vice President of Sales. The Utiba Mobility platform manages over 12 billion mobile financial transactions per year, in deployments that span over 30 countries.