Peppermint teams with Visa to globally scale its digital financial offering

In a milestone move, Peppermint has signed a deal with one of the world’s largest card payment organisations Visa.

Aussie-listed fintech Peppermint Innovation (ASX:PIL) has signed an exclusive five-year agreement with Visa enabling the company to significantly expand its digital financial offering globally.

PIL was invited to partner with Visa as part of Visa’s FinTech Fast Track Program and will initially focus on its key markets of the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia.

Under the partnership agreement, Visa has an exclusive right to provide PIL with credit, debit and pre-paid cards in the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia for a period of five years.

During the period Visa will also provide PIL with significant financial incentives to assist with marketing costs, licensing and implementation fees along with ongoing issuer fee rebates.

Funding Visa card from bizmoto wallet

Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program will enable bizmoto users to fund a Visa debit or pre-paid Visa card directly from their bizmoto wallet.

In turn, bizmoto users will have significantly enhanced cash-out capabilities and the ability to use Visa’s significant global payment infrastructure.

PIL can also issue a Visa debit or pre-paid Visa card linked directly to its bizmoPay program and products, empowering recipients to make regular e-commerce and online transactions.

Growing credit/debit card use in the Philippines

The Philippines has traditionally been a cash-based economy due to a high unbanked population, inadequate banking infrastructure, as well as limited public awareness of electronic payments.

However, recent initiatives adopted by the Philippines government have resulted in a significant rise in card payments during the past few years.

These initiatives have included better banking infrastructure as well as the Central Bank of the Philippines passing a regulation to cap credit card interest rates and the level of interest that can be charged on credit card instalment plans.

Card payments in the Philippines are forecast to rise at an annual rate of 9% to hit P2.8 trillion ($55.7 billion) by 2025, according to leading UK data and analytics company Global Data.

Furthermore, card payments are forecast to grow by 11.6% in 2022 alone, to reach P2.2 trillion ($44 billion).

Of the forecast P2.2 trillion in 2022, P1.3 trillion will be through credit and charge cards while the remaining P945.8 billion will be coursed through debit cards.

This represents an 11% growth for credit and charge cards and a 12.4% hike for debit card payments.

Supporting PIL to scale

Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program provides companies like PIL with the ability to access Visa’s growing partner network, and experts who can provide guidance and resources to support their initiatives as they scale.

Peppermint plans to start issuing Visa debit and pre-paid cards to bizmoto users in Q1 next year subject to the on-boarding and system integration timelines of Visa stipulated third-party partner companies.

PIL has been ticking off achievements in the past few months. The company’s fully owned Philippines subsidiary Peppermint Bizmoto Inc. has been granted a licence to operate as an Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) in the Philippines, massively expanding the reach of its bizmoto app.

PIL’s managing director and CEO Chris Kain said the Visa partnership was a significant milestone for the company.

“Being invited to sign up to Visa’s Fintech FastTrack Program gives Peppermint an edge that we’ve never had before – the ability to issue a debit card or pre-paid card directly linked to a bizmoto wallet,” he said.

“We also can issue Visa credit cards to our bizmoto users, but we want to initially focus on the issuance of debit and pre-paid Visa cards.

“Visa provides ultimate payment interoperability across the globe for our bizmoto users which we believe will retain and attract significantly more bizmoto app users and consequently, more bizmoto app downloads.

This article was developed in collaboration with Peppermint, 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.