NIB chooses Suncash for digital payments

The National Insurance Board (NIB) has sped up one important aspect of its digital transformation, by choosing Suncash as its vendor for digital payments to Bahamians seeking help from the government’s unemployment assistance program, NIB Director Dr. Nicola Virgill-Rolle said Tuesday.

Virgill-Rolle said NIB hoped to have the digital payments solution in place in the next two years, but the negative economic effects of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak expedited those plans.

She said NIB discovered that some of the people applying for unemployment assistance did not have bank accounts, while some gave insufficient or wrong account information to transfer the unemployment assistance to them.

She explained that Suncash stepped in, to onboard those individuals onto their platform, so that they could receive their digital wallets and their payments.

NIB has, so far, paid out $1.96 million via the government’s unemployment assistance program.

“There are people who don’t have bank accounts and so we recognized we had to do something for them as well,” Virgill-Rolle said.

“And, so, what we did was we already had an RFP (request for proposals) for a digital payment solution, so we sped that process up and we’re working with the top candidates. For the process, we knew we wanted an entity which had a physical location, so we used Suncash. So, that’s the entity we are using for the government unemployment assistance program.

“So, they had physical offices throughout The Bahamas [and] also they had the ability to issue digital wallets, so what we’ve done is where you do not have a bank account or you’ve given us incorrect information about your bank account and the bank has rejected the payment, we then send those funds to Suncash.”

Virgill-Rolle said Suncash sends the voucher to the recipients’ mobile device, where they can redeem the voucher for cash or spend it digitally at retail stores.

Virgill-Rolle said the government unemployment assistance program for non-tourism workers remains in place until the end of the government’s emergency orders. Self-employed people in the tourism field receive eight weeks of assistance.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/2020/04/23/nib-chooses-suncash-for-digital-payments/