The agreement will give PIL distribution access to up to 4 million account holders at the Bank of the Philippine Islands.

Peppermint Innovation (ASX:PIL) has taken another key step forward as it builds traction in its core market of the Philippines.

The company announced this morning that it’s signed an Application Programming Interface

(API) agreement with the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI).

The deal will see PIL’s proprietary bizmoto platform integrated into BPIs operating systems, as part of an expanded service offering for BPI customers.

Following the announcement, shares in PIL jumped by more than 10 per cent in morning trade to 4.2c – a new high since the stock relisted on the ASX in February.

An advanced fintech platform in the Philippine marketplace, PIL’s aim with bizmoto is to provide expanded and simplified online banking services for Philippine consumers.

Once integrated, Peppermint’s bizmoto platform will be available to more than 4m BPI customers, across four key product channels; ecommerce; delivery and logistics, and mobile financial services.

 

Major banking partner

Peppermint CEO Chris Kain said it was a “huge honour” to work with BPI, which is the oldest bank in the Philippines (founded in 1851) with 170 years of continuous service.

The bank has a total customer base of around 8.8m clients and operates in a number of core banking markets such as lending, asset management and foreign exchange.

PIL is driving its multi-channel approach for bizmoto through a network of agents, who use the service and can facilitate transactions for members of their local community.

“Under the agreement, existing bizmoto agents will be able to seamlessly top-up their mobile wallet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year via online access to a BPI account,” PIL said.

In addition, all of BPI’s more than four million customers will be given the opportunity to register as bizmoto agents to access the platform’s full suite of services.

From a distribution perspective, Kain told Stockhead that this marks a huge opportunity for growth.

Right now, the company has around 50,000 registered bizmoto agents on its platform.

“Even if we only got, say 10 per cent of that (4m) customer base, you’re still talking about an additional 400,000 agents on our network – that’s the scale of potential growth we now have,” he said.

And it was only made possible due to the many years of groundwork that company has put into it to build out its knowledge of the local market.

“Peppermint’s proven capability and track record of working with other local banking entities has positioned us well to do business with BPI,” Kain said.

He added that once the bizmoto platform is integrated, Peppermint will look to execute on an expanded marketing and awareness campaign to capitalise on its distribution opportunity.

Put in context, Kain said PIL now has the opportunity “to market and explain how our bizmoto platform works to almost 80 times the number of current registered agents”.

“This is yet another step forward on our path to building out our range of bizmoto ecosystem of services across the Philippines.

“We are honoured to be in partnership with BPI on this project and look forward to continuing to contribute to the important goal of delivering financial inclusion to the Filipino people.”

This article was developed in collaboration with Peppermint Innovation, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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