Seafarer salaries, allotments go cashless with MarCoPay

Seafarer salaries, allotments go cashless with MarCoPay
Yashika F. Torib November 3, 2021 https://www.manilatimes.net/2021/11/03/business/maritime/seafarer-salari...

Salary disbursement, allotments, and other financial transactions of seafarers are now made accessible with a tap of a finger.

MarCoPay (MCP) is an eWallet platform designed primarily for seafarers, their families, and friends who benefit from salary, loan, and allotment transactions with their manning companies.

Areson Cuevas, vice president, and chief operating officer assured that Mcp operates as a safe, efficient, reliable, affordable, and inclusive payment system in the country. Its systems are regulated and supervised by Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. "Before any service is publicly released, hours and hours of user acceptance tests are being performed to ensure that all features are not only working but safe and reliable. MCP also made sure that its security system is all in place, and that its salary process is approved by both DOLE and POEA. This means that e-Money salary payment can be used by both land-based and sea-based employees," he said.

Supported by shipping giants MCP currently has more than a thousand seafarers enjoying its services. These are seafarer-employees of Mcp's shareholders, the Japanese shipping giant Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), and the Transnational Diversified Group (TDG). "MCP together with its shareholders cannot, by all means, do fraud on its seafarers because this would also mean risking the good relationship between the manning company and its seafarers which they have kept in the last five decades," Cuevas said. Security features "MCP has a one-account-per-device policy. It also has security features in place like the use of biometrics for login. This means that a person can only use one mobile phone to register and access/log in to your account. So even if someone knew his/her login credentials, he/she cannot use it to log in using other devices.

How it works MarCoPay offers salary disbursement to manning agencies or ship manning companies using a web-based platform. The manning agency purchases e digital currency from Mcp and arranges salary payments to their crew who will receive it through their MarCoPay mobile app. "For now, we only have three cash-in options: Salary payments, Loans, and MCP e-Money Transfer. When seafarers are out of the country, they'll have balance in their e-Wallets once they receive their salary or when they apply for a loan through our independent affiliate company. Then, they can cash out to their bank accounts and use their ATM cards to withdraw anywhere.

"Their families can also download and register to the MarCoPay app and easily receive remittance from the seafarer onboard. "Then for cash out, they will also have the option to send it to another e-Wallet or a bank. For families that live in rural areas like provinces, Mcp offers the convenience of cashing out to pawnshops, banks, and over-the-counter payment centers, whichever is closest to them." According to Areson, Mcp is also already in discussion with Visa card. By early 2022, it will be providing its users with prepaid Visa cards to enable them to do their purchases and/or withdraw their money anytime, anywhere even outside the Philippines.

Convenience at its best Mcp offers a wide variety of transfer options to its users. This means transactions can be made both with Mcp applications and with other e-money platforms. "They can also send e-Money to users of other e-Money wallets like Gcash, PayMaya, and GrabPay. MCP also offers cashout or transfers to major banks (BDO, BPI, BPI family, EastWest Bank, Landbank, Metrobank, RCBC, Security Bank, and UnionBank), pawnshops (Cebuana Lhuillier, M Lhuillier, RD Pawnshop and Villarica), and over-the-counter payment centers (LBC and Perahub). "And to even better support this need of the community to easily transfer and receive their salaries, the MarCoPay app is developed to be able to hold US Dollars to do Forex and, within the same app, exchange them to Philippine Pesos to be able to send it to their families back home and make payments in the Philippines," Areson said. MCP can be downloaded from Google Play Store and Apple App Store.