Turkey's domestic digital wallet, PeP, has initiated a campaign to support the global fight against the COVID-19 coronavirus and to encourage the public to stay home.
As part of its campaign, PeP will conduct all money transactions between Europe and Turkey free of charge until April 22.
“Public health is our primary concern, and as PeP, our main goal is to make our customers’ lives easier,” said Artun Kumrulu, Paladyum Electronic Money and Payment Systems Board Member, the company behind PeP. “We aim to meet the cash needs of our customers and encourage the public to continue to stay indoors. Our campaign will provide convenience and help our customers reach their loved ones without the need of going outside.”
Globally, the number of people who need to make low value, retail cross-border transfers has grown rapidly since 1990. Today, there are more migrant workers than ever before, not to mention global nomads and international students. These groups are grossly under-serviced by the global banking community, and international remittances are expensive and cumbersome.
Traditionally, the physical networks / brick & mortar branch options for migrant workers are money transfer networks, which tend to be expensive, cash intensive and fall short of modern digitization standards.
In addition, major financial institutions prefer not to serve remittance companies in order to serve this domain Paladyum partners with London-based Clear Junction, a fintech company that offers correspondent accounts to financial institutions to extend services to consumer technology companies interested in the global payment infrastructure. Clear Junction helps payment companies in workers’ country of origin to have a collection account in places to where workers migrated.
“There is no need for migrant workers and anyone else to stand in line and make cash transactions at this dangerous time, and so Clear Junction is proud to partner with Paladyum on this very important project and social initiative; we are committed to serving fintech companies outside their domestic geographies,” said Dima Kats, CEO of Clear Junction. “In this difficult time, it’s important for fintech companies to do their part to be upstanding and caring corporate citizens.”