MiTurno: Transfermovil’s new asset to purchase foreign currency

In the next few days, MiTurno will be operational. This is a new Transfermóvil service to reserve a turn to purchase foreign currency at Cadeca, an option that until now has been handled by the Ticket platform.

This was announced to CubaSí by the Director of support and development of the digital products division, engineer Julio Antonio García Trápaga, who pointed out that, as part of a new version of Transfermóvil, MiTurno service is the result of a joint work with Cadeca to achieve a fully automated process from the moment the client makes the reservation until the customer appears in person for the purchase of foreign currency on the corresponding day. It will be valid only in Havana in this first stage.

Once the application is downloaded or updated, it will be available from MiTransfer digital wallet and the three banks that are within Transfermóvil: Banco Popular de Ahorro (BPA), Banco Metropolitano (BANMET) and Banco de Crédito y Comercio (BANDEC).

There, you can request an appointment, check the progress of the queue and remove your turn. MiTurno does not require special skills or knowledge for its use, which can be done intuitively.

How to reserve a turn?

Once logged in within the application, the client selects one of the six Cadecas in Havana that sell foreign currency, writes down their Identity Card number and, optionally, can add a confirmation phone number, finally checks in the accept option and an appoint number is assigned.

The reservation of the turn will have a fee of 10 CUP and the order number in the queue will be sent to the client by SMS.

García Trápaga stressed that the turn of the clients who have already reserved through the Ticket apk will be respected. From the moment the application is released in Transfermóvil, the new turn will be added consecutively to the existing waiting list.

To check the progress of the waiting list, the necessary queries can be made and, in this new option - unlike the alternative in force until now where the order number decreases as the queue advances - the interested party will be given their order number, which will always be constant, and what number they are on the waiting list or queue, as it is usually called, a procedure similar to that of traditional queues where they ask "what number are you on."

When there are 24 hours left until the client’s turn, the customer receives a text message on their mobile phone notifying them that the next day is their turn to buy, and on the day of the purchase they also receive a second SMS with the reminder.

How many turns can a customer requests?

Each person can request up to 4 turns with their respective Identity Cards. The rule that the customer can only be on a single waiting list or queue is maintained. Only after having made the purchase of the currency when their turn is due, can they request another turn again.

Each Cadeca office serves a certain number of turns for the purchase of foreign currency every day, depending on its availability. The maximum amount to buy, as until now, will be 100 USD, at the official exchange rate.

The client will have the option of changing the turn if for some reason, he or she cannot go on the day he or she is supposed to go to buy the currency.

García Trápaga explains that, when the client knows that he will not be able to appear in person, always prior to giving notice, he or she can notify and inform from what date he or she would be available to go to Cadeca, thus establishing a kind of rotation in the queue, which continues to moving forward.

If once the date indicated by the client has arrived, his turn has not yet been assigned, he must wait for the notice; and if his turn has already passed, the day indicated by him will be assigned the possibility of buying. Whoever does not go to Cadeca when notified, loses the right to purchase, as currently happens with Ticket.

In the event that someone decides not to make the purchase once they have acquired the turn, they can select the Delete option.

The queue, Transfermóvil manager highlights, advances once a day based on the number of turns indicated by Cadeca.

The queue must only be consulted by the client who requested the turns, even if there were four in total with different names.

Clients who have their number in MiTurno through the use of the MiTransfer wallet, will be able to personally consult, with their Identity Card number, the progress of the queue, without depending on the person who requested the turns to manage it.

Transfermóvil, an alternative that is always being updated

Transfermóvil, the application developed by ETECSA in partnership with Banco Popular de Ahorro (BPA), Banco de Crédito y Comercio (BANDEC) and Banco Metropolitano (BANMET) for mobile devices with the Android operating system, continues to grow and improve.

It already has 5.2 million users, maintains a sustained growth of between 1,500 and 2,000 users daily and has already exceeded 850 million operations so far this year.

More than 70% of electronic commerce operations – electronic payments – are carried out through this application and for a year and a half there have gone uninterrupted.

Asked about the difficulties that customers faced when making electronic payments, which have increased with the banking process, García Trápaga explains that Transfermóvil, as a payment gateway, is interconnected with several platforms, including those of the banking system, and if any element of these platforms presents some kind of temporary unavailability, this will affect, for the user, the availability of the payment management that is done through Transfermóvil, although it is not the application fault.

This application, which will celebrate its 10^th anniversary on February 10, includes more than 70 services. In particular, the mobile wallet MiTransfer, already in operation for a year and a half, exceeds 5 million users.

The progress and achievements of Transfermóvil are due, in addition to the performance of its staff, to an investment process that has been carried out on the platform for two years, guaranteeing its geographic redundancy and local redundancy as well. These investments, carried out by ETECSA and there are more to come as well, strengthen the platform by guaranteeing its availability, even outside of the so-called geographic redundancy, which allows that if a problem occurs in a given place, the demand for the service can be met from another place.

García Trápaga specifies that this is an investment process in stages, which is not finite, but continuous, and develops as demand grows.

Currently, Transfermóvil is operating stably, emphasizes the manager, and has all the structures ready for the next development phases in the foreseeable future.

A staff made up of 27 trained professionals, with an average age of less than 38 years and most with more than five years of experience in their specialty, works at Transfermóvil, which periodically launches new versions.

In the latter, which will be launched soon, in addition to the new MiTurno asset, more reservation alternatives are incorporated to visit heritage sites. After a long period of work with the Facilitation Office (OFA), a little over a year ago the possibility of reserving visits to heritage sites in Havana by paying through Transfermóvil began.

Now, these reservations are also extended to other heritage sites in the country: In Matanzas, Castillo de San Severino; in Cienfuegos, Castillo de Jagua; in Santiago de Cuba, Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca; and in the case of Havana, other spaces are included such as the Museo de Ron (Museum of Rum) and the Numismático (Coin Museum), among others, most of them located in the so-called historical center of the city.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff