Peppermint Innovation: ‘Watch the Pennies and the Pounds Will Look After Themselves’

Perth-based Peppermint Innovation is a ‘FinTech’ that operates an established mobile payments and remittance platform, initially in the Philippines, for the ‘unbanked’.

We first need to define two terms:

‘Fintech’ refers to Finance Technology used to make certain ‘niche’ financial services more efficient. At the moment, they are generally start-ups founded with the purpose of disrupting incumbent financial systems and corporations that rely on things like branch networks or having bank accounts.

The ‘unbanked’ is a relatively common term – adults who do not have their own bank accounts. Along with the underbanked, they rely on alternative financial services where these are available.

Peppermint’s success is that its initial target market is the Philippines where 75% of its 100 million people are unbanked but where mobile (smartphone) penetration is over 100%.

It has built a white label Android app – a remittance platform – that is a Filipino version of M-Pesa, the mobile payments app that took Kenya by storm.

The unbanked need to do at least three things:

• Send money to family or friends
• Pay bills
• Buy/top-up mobile airtime – most of the market is pre-paid