Fintech Company Minka Seeks to Reduce the Use of Cash in Colombia

To encourage digital payments and discourage the use of cash, Colombian fintech company Minka created the largest real-time interbank transfer infrastructure in the country and the fastest growing in Latin America. Through its platform it has processed more than 18 million online transactions, helping more than 2 million users.

Digital payments in Colombia are becoming more accepted every day, reflecting the collective efforts to reduce the use of cash, especially in the Fintech sector. They currently represent 54% of transactions nationwide and last year alone recorded 11,160 million transactions, of which 4,894 million were monetary. That is revealed by figures from the Banco de la República and the Superfinanciera, which also confirmed that in 2021 close to 11 million people carried out different banking transactions from their cell phones.

Despite these good indicators, cash continues to be the main preferred means of payment in the country with a share of 88%. According to the issuer, its use generates a series of ‘hidden social costs’, which include phenomena such as tax evasion and money laundering, in addition to the fact that it is a barrier to banking penetration and has a perception of insecurity that correlates with the culture of crime, which makes its use costly and unsafe for businesses and users in general.

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Minka’s proposal to reduce cash

To respond to this problem and encourage more people to access digital payments and reduce the use of paper money in their transactions, a Colombian fintech company created the largest technological infrastructure for interbank transfers in the country and the fastest growing in Latin America.

This is Minka, a company founded in 2018 that has an open network that allows organizations to publish balances and move balances immediately. The company, through its technological solutions, has improved the way people interact with money in Colombia and is now building an open network to publish balances in real-time and extend its functionalities and services globally.

Its network, explained Paola Sánchez, co-founder of the fintech company, “was designed to connect independent traditional systems using blockchain concepts and modern application programming interfaces (APIs) that help simplify complex money movements in real-time, securely, at no cost and using just a cell phone number to make digital payments and replace cash.”

Its goal is to serve the country’s unbanked population, which decreased by 8% during the pandemic, thanks in part to the growth in the use of financial applications.

Currently, the solution enabled by Minka, allows financial institutions, fintech companies, and clearing houses to have new products and functionalities such as immediate interbank transfers, mobile wallets, and massive online collection and dispersion, among other services, in just days and without having to develop their own infrastructure.

“We have processed around 18 million online transactions among more than 2 million users. Minka’s average monthly growth has been 25%; however, we project to increase this indicator by 5 percentage points by the end of 2022,” said Sánchez.

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(Featured image by rupixen via Pixabay)

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First published in VALORA ANALITIK, a third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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