Opening a Nationwide Mobile Wallet

Four in five Peruvians don’t have a bank account, but in a country of 30 million people, there are about 32 million cell phones. So the leading Peruvian banks have teamed up to get money moving through those phones. On Dec. 15, Peru Digital Payments, a company owned and operated by the country’s leading financial institutions, launched Bim, a mobile payment program that unites all their online customer interfaces on one system.

“We want this program to reach the people who don’t have bank accounts,” says Carolina Trivelli, who’s overseeing Bim and previously ran the government’s development ministry. “That’s the woman who lives in the countryside and has a nine-key cell phone, a 2G connection, and a prepaid phone plan.”