MANILA, Philippines - The mobile cash transfer program deployed by Smart e-Money Inc. (SMI), a subsidiary of Smart Communications Inc., in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda was named the best mobile money service in the world at the 11th Meffys Awards in San Francisco, USA.
The SMI program beat mobile money projects of the likes of banking and financial services giant Barclays and the London Stock Exchange-listed Bango.
The Meffys is organized by the MEF, a London-based trade organization focusing on mobile content and commerce. More than 250 entries from 30 countries joined this year’s awards program, and were judged by a panel of journalists, academics, analysts, and venture capitalists from all over the world.
SMI’s mobile cash transfer program, initiated in December 2013 in partnership with the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP), was rolled out in hard-hit Tacloban City as a payment fulfillment facility for the cash-for-work disaster relief intervention of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
LBP issued cash cards to disburse the wages of those who participated in the UNDP initiative.
Beneficiaries could use these cards to withdraw money from any bank ATM. The cards were linked to their Smart mobile number, enabling Smart to notify them via SMS when money was credited to their account.
The mobile cash transfer program was the quickest disaster response deployment of its kind in the world, leveraging on Smart’s innovative mobile money platform.
More than 27,000 households in 200 UN-identified areas of intervention benefitted from this initiative.
In fact, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon cited the service as an initiative that needed to be replicated worldwide.
More than providing a convenient and secure way of disbursing the salaries of UNDP’s cash-for-work beneficiaries, it also provided segments of the Philippine population who were formerly unbanked, access to the formal financial system.
Early this year, the SMI program was named Best Mobile Payment Implementation at the Smart Awards in Singapore, besting a dozen finalists from other Asian countries.