CDMX, November 2018, FIMPE, a trust created to extend the benefits of access to electronic payment infrastructure to society, announced that it is ready to replicate the social support delivery platform to the 6,489 social development programs and actions that exist in Mexico, and that do not have biometric characters as a means of control and identification of their beneficiaries.
The above was explained by FIMPE executives who said that of the 6,489 social programs detected by CONEVAL at the federal, state and municipal levels that are divided into categories such as economic well-being, health, education and social security, among others; The Prospera program, formerly known as Oportunidades, uses fingerprint biometrics to authenticate the identity of the person receiving program resources, whether monetary or in-kind. This prevents duplication of support, minimizes the risk of identity theft, and offers better controls and response times, as well as contributing to transparency in the delivery of public resources.
FIMPE, in 2009, together with institutions such as BANSEFI, launched the first program to deliver social support using fingerprint biometrics as a means of identifying beneficiaries. By 2012, there were already 6.5 million cards linked to the biometric data of the program beneficiaries. Currently, the platform is complemented by more than 15,000 biometric point-of-sale terminals (POS) operating nationwide and is ready for the use of other types of electronic devices.
Currently, FIMPE processes 90 million biometric transactions annually, with more than 7 million cards issued, which have four fingerprints recorded: two of the cardholder and two of a substitute in case the cardholder cannot receive support due to illness, absence from the community, or any other circumstance.
Gueorgui Nikolov Popov stated that according to data recently released by INAI regarding government programs, during 2017, the nearly 6,500 social benefit actions that exist nationwide delivered just over 200 billion pesos, of which FIMPE helped deliver, with the certainty provided by the beneficiary’s biometric authentication, 52 billion pesos, or a quarter of the total. part of the total reported by the INAI. Which is very good, but it is not enough.
Currently, in almost all social programs, beneficiary accreditation is done manually, with paper records, or with cardboard cards and holograms, among others. The beneficiary accreditation process, at best, is carried out by presenting some type of document.
“Today, there is no single beneficiary registry that allows transparency in how resources are used and how they are dispersed among the population. The ideal is to reach the more than 6,000 existing social programs and generate a unique digital identity for beneficiaries with fingerprint biometrics.”
– explained Georgui Nikolov Popov, General Director of EL FIMPE.
The executive mentioned that the challenge lies in modernizing and standardizing existing and newly created social support programs to avoid duplication of users, support conditioned on the population, clear and transparent controls over resources received and granted, as well as controls to reconcile and maintain an updated registry of beneficiaries and avoid anonymity. Finally, he explained that “political will is crucial for making the processes and resources of social programs transparent through the use of biometrics. At FIMPE, we have already made the social support delivery platform a success; now is the time to replicate it and extend its benefits to the population.”
