E-payment offers better access and speed

IN promoting e-payments as a viable alternative to paper-based payment, Bank Negara has focused on enhancing the key attributes of payment services that are important to users, namely the accessibility of payment services, the speed at which funds are made available to beneficiaries, the certainty of payment to the correct recipients, and the ease of identifying the purpose of payments.

The first phase of developing an open ecosystem that would enable the offering of mobile banking and payment services via a multi-bank and mobile network-neutral infrastructure has been completed.

The services, offered under the brand label Mymobile are currently being piloted by three major banks in partnership with two mobile network operators and functions using the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data technology.

Registered users can view transaction history, perform balance enquiries, fund transfers and bill payment transactions at any time and from any location.

The system and process enhancements undertaken by the banking industry have delivered substantial improvements in the speed of interbank fund transfers. Fund transfers between accounts within the same bank are already in real-time.

To improve the capture of payment and remittance information, senders can now specify the purpose of transactions and beneficiaries can obtain the payment details from their banks upon request. This will allow payments to be more easily identified for reconciliation purposes.

A key strategy in Bank Negara’s efforts to encourage the increased adoption of e-payments has been to focus on priority sectors that have high payment transaction flows, and where the bank is able to work collaboratively with specific key stakeholders to accelerate the migration to e-payments.

Having migrated nearly all government payments to electronic fund transfers, the Government has set an ambitious goal to achieve 90% of all revenue collection and payments by the public to be effected via e-channels by 2015.

Banking institutions have ceased cheque issuances for settlements among themselves, and are committed to progressively migrate all internal payments to e-channels. In addition, banks have also continued to introduce banking products with fee structures that incentivise the adoption of e-payments.

Following the collaboration between Bank Negara and the Securities Commission to implement the e-share Payment and e-dividend initiatives, 59.4% of total dividend payments amounting to Rm43.4bil were made via e-dividend in 2011, displacing 3.5 million cheques.

About 2.1 million share payments valued at Rm308bil were made using e-channels.