Gov­ern­ment yes­ter­day launched the Na­tion­al Pay­ment and In­no­va­tion Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go, promis­ing that the new com­pa­ny marked an his­toric step in its jour­ney to­ward mod­ern, peo­ple-cen­tred gov­er­nance.

The new state-owned en­ter­prise has been cre­at­ed to mod­ernise, stream­line and se­cure the col­lec­tion and dis­burse­ment of all gov­ern­ment pay­ments, plac­ing ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty, trans­paren­cy and ef­fi­cien­cy at the heart of pub­lic ser­vice de­liv­ery, the com­pa­ny said in a news re­lease.

The com­pa­ny said that with a mis­sion to reach every cit­i­zen, in every com­mu­ni­ty, for every gov­ern­ment trans­ac­tion, it would be­come the uni­fied gate­way for all pub­lic-sec­tor fi­nan­cial in­ter­ac­tions. From pay­ing tax­es and re­new­ing li­cences to col­lect­ing pen­sions or so­cial grants, in­di­vid­u­als can now com­plete these trans­ac­tions with ease — on­line or in per­son — at over 1,000 au­tho­rised lo­ca­tions na­tion­wide, in­clud­ing Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board out­lets and oth­er trust­ed part­ner points