102 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN APRIL 2021 (Georgia Institute of Technology) in Atlanta, GA, he is no stranger to the startup ecosystem. As his fourth startup, WiPay achieved traction through a combination of his tenacity and ambition to succeed and a massive need for financial inclusion in his native country of Trinidad and Tobago. “WiPay was founded in 2016,” Wayne recalls. “We started it out of a need for online payment acceptance in the Caribbean because two to three years ago, online payments in the Caribbean were virtually non-existent, with no solutions that allowed you to make payments via a website or mobile app. At the time, online payments were limited to large organizations that would approach banks to set something up for them.” This limitation in financial inclusion shut out the average person in the country. Existing solutions like PayPal, while available, placed severe restrictions on users, requiring, for example, that anyone wishing to withdraw money from PayPal have a U.S. bank account. Although this lack of financial inclusion created a negative financial experience in the country, it presented the golden opportunity that WiPay needed to become the leading online payments provider in the country and region. “That’s why we started WiPay,” affirms Wayne. “Because of that need, we started a company to provide online payment services to the Caribbean independent of having you go to the bank, which was the current AT A GLANCE WIPAY WHAT: A growing FinTech payment solutions provider WHERE: Headquarters in Port of Spain, Trinidad WEBSITE: www.wipaycaribbean.com
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