VisionFund Cambodia launches M-Payment Service

VisionFund Cambodia launched the M-payment service in January in partnership with Australia-based firm Wing to bring innovation and greater convenience to financial services.

The launching has made VisionFund Cambodia the country’s first MFI to deliver such a service, which extends access of financial services to those living in rural Cambodia at a low cost.

It will build an economic system for communities that allow un-banked people to hold money, transfer, and make payments with a low-cost bank account. It will also improve VisionFund efficiency by reducing the use of paper-based loan transactions and by reducing the need to transfer information from field officers and encode it into the VisionFund’ s eMerge system. In addition, it will build a platform for access to information.

The money transfer will particularly save money for clients who have been used more expensive money transfer intermediaries such as radio phone-based transfer service or taxi drivers.

“We spend US$2.5 each time we send money [usually US$50 several times a month] to our mother through a taxi driver. It is a fixed price, no matter how much we send,”  Chorn Chanta, a married garment worker in Phnom Penh, says, referring to her mother, who lives in Kompong Cham province, more than 200 kilometers from Phnom Penh.

“With such a service [which charges only US$ 0.05 to 0.10 percent of the money transferred], it will be so good, easy and fast,” Chanta predicts. “We only press the buttons [on our phone]; the money will be transferred. It will save us time and expense.”