The Department of Agriculture’s has announced the use of PayMaya, a mobile wallet under the purview of PLDT, to disburse loans for their Kapital Access for Young Agripreneurs (KAYA) financing program through the “KAYA” cash card.
The initiative was formally launched on 6 July 2020 by the Agriculture Secretary William Dar on behalf of the DA’s Agricultural Credit Policy Council (ACPC) and Orlando Vea, founder and CEO of PayMaya Philippines Inc.
“With this digital platform, we will be able to reach out and convince more Filipino millennials to engage in agriculture, fishery and agribusiness ventures, and more importantly bankroll their respective projects,”
“As our lockdown experience has shown, we need to further explore the cyberspace and take our digitalization efforts to the next level as part of the new normal,”
said Secretary Dar.
PayMaya claims to allow ACPC’s KAYA partner lending conduits (PLCs) to digitally disburse loans through reloadable cash cards with real-time crediting using a web-based portal. Loan beneficiaries will also have access to other PayMaya financial services such as e-wallet account, remittance, bills payment, and fund withdrawal.
“KAYA is the first digitized DA-ACPC financing program. Its training and mentoring component is done through web conferencing and its disbursements and collections will now be done through PayMaya,”
“They need not come over to Metro Manila, but simply get their approved KAYA loan from ATM terminals using their KAYA cash card,”
“Now, more than ever, as we continue fulfilling our mandate of providing easy, timely, and affordable credit to farmers and fisherfolk, we are recognizing that digital financing is the way forward,”
said DA-ACPC Executive Director Jocelyn Badiola.
Featured image credit: Department of Agriculture