‘Make the most of Fulbright ETAs’

SIBU: The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant ( ETA) programme should be well utilised by the schools as it will boost students’ confidence in the English language.

Sarawak Teachers’ Union (STU) president Jisin Nyud said with ETAs present in schools, students and teachers will learn how to listen to and speak the language with these native speakers of English.

Ji sin was responding to Ministry of Education deputy director- general Datuk Ahmad Tajudin Jab’s recent statement that the Fulbright ETA programme in the country would continue at least until 2020.

Ahmad Tajudin was reported as saying the latest batch of 98 ETAs from the United States would spend 10 months in secondary schools in eight states this year, namely Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan, Perak, Pahang, Terengganu, Sabah and Sarawak, under the supervision of qualified Malaysian teachers

“I believe that their presence will also boost the students’ confidence in the English language. Since the number of these Fulbright students are limited, they should not be placed in the same schools before this,” Jisin told The Borneo Post yesterday.

“In an effort to correct the price signal, in May 2013 the IBG fee was brought down from RM2 to 10 sen and the cheque fee was brought up to 50 sen in January 2015 to encourage public to do more e-payments.

“As a result, the volume of IBG and Instant Transfer increased 292 per cent from 66 million a year to about 260 million in 2016,” he said.

Overall, he said the momentum for cheque migration was progressing very well, but the cash side posed a bigger challenge. Tan said Malaysians boasted about 44 million automatic teller machine (ATM)/ debit cards, of which 18 million were actively used mostly for ATM cash withdrawals for a bankable population of about 22 million.

As the economy grows, more cash is needed to support its activities and BNM will have to print more bank notes, which have to be processed by the banks to be provided to end users through ATM machines and the process will recycle, hence costing the country quite significantly, he said.

To counter the increase in cash, he said it was hoped that the people would change their behaviour and use debit card in their payments, whereby their ATM card was also a debit card.

“In the past, people were not using much of debit cards compared to cash, which I believe, was due to lack of awareness and perhaps habit,” he said.

Meanwhile, most POS terminals are also with higher-tier merchants as the merchant discount rate ( MDR) may not be affordable to lower-tier merchants and therefore, give less opportunity to use debit cards.

To foster the use of debit cards to displace cash, BNM had issued a framework in 2015 to address the distortions and ensure the cost of accepting payments cards is fair and reasonable.

The framework saw the interchange fees for debit cards lowered which resulted in a decline in the MDR.

Tan said debit card usage was now growing much faster than that of the credit cards, with transactions increasing from 23 million in 2011 and estimated close to 96 million as at the end of 2016.

He said debit card growth from 2011-2016 was about 20 per cent, while that of credit cards increased between two and four per cent for the same period, signifying a trend that people were taking less cash from ATM machines, instead using them directly at POS terminals.

On the migration to PIN-based payments cards, he explained that it was one of the initiatives to further enhance the security of the payment card infrastructure.

Malaysia took a bold step to migrate into chips in 2005 to stem the tide of counterfeit fraud from gaining ground.

After being on chips for a long time, Tan said the country was now moving a step higher to enable PIN to be used at POS in order to make e-payment cards safer.

On concerns over contactless payment not being safe, he said with contactless functionality set on a chip, it would be very difficult to make counterfeits.

If ever some defrauders are able to steal data from the chips, he said, at this juncture they would still be unable to produce another chip card as the technology used advanced cryptography, thus preventing the card from being cloned.

Tan said even e- commerce transactions would be a daunting task for the defrauders as cardholders were protected by fraud monitoring systems like unusual activity alert by banks, as well as requirement for strong authentication through one-time passwords which would be sent to mobile devices. — Bernama