CTO, Bitt sign FinTech MOU

The Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO) is getting on the blockchain bandwagon, signing a memorandum of understanding with digital currency technology company Bitt, to help streamline payments for tourism-related products.

The two Barbados-based organizations signed the MOU this morning at the CTO’s headquarters in Bridgetown. Bitt’s digital wallet and merchant applications will be promoted to help foster broader economic participation in community-based tourism and related sectors, a release from the CTO said.

“The Caribbean aims to fully examine the advantages offered by new financial technology.

Blockchain financial services have the potential to advance specific programmes and activities in the tourism sector, and the CTO has a responsibility on behalf of our members to fully explore those possibilities,” Hugh Riley, the CTO’s secretary general, said.

Both organisations anticipate that by leveraging digital currency, the Caribbean region can become a more integrated economy in terms of the ease of doing business for visitors who move through multiple regional destinations.

“Expanding Bitt’s footprint throughout the region is important to us because we know how transformational our technology can be, particularly for the region’s informal sector, for the unbanked and by extension, the economy.

Tourism is the largest single contributor to the Caribbean economy and is absolutely critical to every single Caribbean nation’s well-being and development. Thus we see this as a very natural and necessary association,” Rawdon Adams, Bitt’s chief executive officer, said. The arrangement is for an initial three-year period, but it can be extended by mutual agreement.