Utiba, leading provider of mobile financial services solutions, announced today that Banco FIE, Bolivia's leading micro-finance institution, has selected Utiba to provide the platform for its mobile wallet.
The mobile wallet has proven to be an excellent means of expanding banking services to the financially underserved communities which Banco FIE was created to serve.
Twenty-six years ago FIE was born as a non-governmental organization (NGO) to promote sustainable, economic development among low-income families, who had no access to formal sources of credit.
The NGO's successful performance encouraged its founders to create, in 1998, a private financial fund, regulated and authorized by the Bolivian Banking Superintendency to extend microcredit. Since then it has grown and in 2010 was transformed into a full-fledged bank with a continued focus on the microenterprise sector. Today FIE is one of Bolivia's largest banks in terms of geographic coverage, with one hundred eighty four offices nationwide, and in number of customers, with more than one hundred eighty thousand individual loan customers and five hundred thousand savings accounts. The Bank has long been recognized as a leading micro-finance institution in the region and was most recently awarded "Best Micro-Finance Institution in Latin America and the Caribbean" by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The IADB has recognized the banks' excellence on three other occasions.
Banco FIE selected Utiba to provide a robust and scalable mobile financial services platform that will allow the bank to deploy a full range of mobile financial services, to be rolled out incrementally. The Utiba platform has been deployed in over 30 countries worldwide and principally by mobile network operators, financial institutions and third party payment service providers looking to provide financial services to the so called "unbanked," which are estimated to number 2.5 billion people worldwide.
Utiba CEO for the Americas Henryk Dabrowski spoke enthusiastically about the selection saying, "We are honored to have been selected by Banco FIE for this important strategy. The bank is known for establishing best practices and a leading use of technology in the micro-finance industry in Latin America. With their superior service capabilities and our robust and flexible hosted platform together we will deploy meaningful and impactful mobile financial services in Bolivia."
Elizabeth Nava, Banco FIE's General Manager, emphasized that, "The technology is key to be able to provide our services to unbanked populations, as it allows us to manage our clients' financial transactions at the lowest possible cost and greatest proximity to where they earn and spend money."