Very good. Here's a transcript of a very upbeat Chris Kain towards the end of the podcast:
Andrew Musgrave, ASX Briefs: Okay and just to wrap things up, two questions: Are there any new markets or additional services you’re looking to explore, and also what are some of the key milestones you're looking to achieve in the next 12-18 months?
Chris Kain, CEO, Peppermint Innovation Ltd: Yeah, look sure. I mean, we are firmly focused on two revenue streams in the business. We're focused on the revenue stream that comes from a smart and fair bismoLoan or finance company process, providing microfinance for instance. And we’re also focused on an EMI revenue stream and that is basically people utilizing our wallet, having money on our wallet – an Electronic Money Issue licence revenue stream, I should say - having money on the wallet and performing transactions.
So we continue to see our bismoLoan revenue grow strongly Quarter-on-Quarter. We're coming from a small base, but the focus of bismoLoan at the moment is purely to provide loans for that microfinance, that corner sari-sari store – so that microfinance initiative. And microfinance is not a new concept. It was first put in place I think in Bangladesh by Professor Muhammad Yunus who created the concept of trying to provide people a hand up, not a handout - through allowing them to access funds to build a business. And that's what microfinance is, and that's what we're aiming to do in the Philippines - and doing with our registered sari-sari store network at the moment.
Additionally with our EMI and our partnership with MASS SPECC, where we're providing effectively our platform in white label to MASS SPECC to power what they call their Pinoy Coop mobile. We're providing a transactional-based digital wallet service that allows MASS SPECC to roll out their mobile app, their Pinoy Coop Mobile, to their some-3.4 million members to provide digital financial services. Simple things like being able to pay bills, as I said, be able to buy eLoad, be able to access lending, be able to access insurance – all via a mobile app.
I was up there recently only a couple of weeks ago and we were at the 50th General Assembly of MASS SPECC where we were front and centre as the commercial and technical partner. There were over a thousand delegates in the room. It was quite interesting talking to some of the individuals in the room who - and one that stuck in my mind particularly was one particular lady who was over 60 years of age. She was a MASS SPECC employee actually. She had just been introduced to the Pinoy Coop Mobile App, first mobile app she’d ever used. The first time she'd ever interacted with a mobile app …and she couldn't believe that she could check the balance of her ATM account on her mobile phone so she knew how much money she had in her ATM account, as opposed to having to go to an ATM and check the balance at the ATM. So she said it was amazing - it saved her so much time, it gave her so much comfort. But that was her first interaction.
So this is something that we need to understand. This is what we're on the precipice of. You know, across the whole of the Philippines there’s more than something in the order of 15 million members of 9,000-odd individual cooperatives across the whole of the Philippines. MASS SPECC does have a vision to try and unify all those co-ops and provide digital financial inclusion, digital financial services. And we’re front and centre as the technology and commercial partner with these guys.
One of the key things is every time a transaction goes across our EMI-licensed wallet, our Bismoto wallet, which fundamentally is the centrepiece of the Pinoy Coop App, we earn a transaction fee. So that transaction fee equates to roughly 10 cents Australian.
So you can see that if we have these members starting to download the app - and we're going through that process at the moment, where they download the app, and they start integrating and using the app for different transactions - if you're even able to get to one, two, three million members, it starts to become quite an amazing opportunity for the company.
And right now, that is a very key focus for us. So that's really the future prospects and the expansion plans. I mean, we look to see and leverage completely what we've built in the Philippines. We’ve built a great platform that's commercially deployed and proven - the bismoto platform. We've wrapped over the top of that to be compliant with all the regulations, we have wrapped two licenses around that – we’ve wrapped our finance company licence and our EMI licence, our Electronic Money Issuer licence. That allows us to deliver financial services to the unbanked and the underbanked and provide a roadmap to financial inclusion for these people.
So it's a really compelling business case that we have, and we're just on the precipice of actually busting that wide open. So we're pretty excited.
