Real-time payment solutions in the offing
The real-time payment solutions in Oman is to give an entirely new dimension to automation of various clearing house services to the banks and their customers in the Sultanate.
The projects, which are under active consideration of the Central Bank of Oman, are equipped with handling sophisticated functionalities and processing needs of all the banks operating in the country.
A senior official of real-time payments solutions company ProgressSoft termed these projects as major steps for the Sultanate’s finance sector that have ability to do a paradigm shift in clearing house services and online banking besides many other services.
Yazan Goldstein, Corporate Communications Executive at ProgressSoft confirmed the company’s association with the CBO, which has taken up the ambitious task of streamlining the real-time payment tools in line with the international standards. He was in Salalah to take part in a meeting held exclusively to discuss electronic payment outlook of Oman.
“The scope of these collective projects will include the implementation of Automated Clearing House solution (PS-ACH), the Mandate Management System (PS-ACH/ MMS), the Wages Protection System (PS-ACH/WPS), the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (PS-EBPP), the Mobile Payment Clearing System (PS-mpClear) and the Payments Dispute Management System (PSDisputeManager),” said Goldstein.
“PS-ACH will cater all domestic credit and direct debit fund transfers between banks operating in Oman; where the entire system — including both the central and the participant modules — will be hosted in ASP mode at CBO data centres, providing sophisticated functionalities and processing needs to all 25 banks operating in the country,” he said.
Furthermore, the project titled ‘PS- ACH Direct Debit Module’ will be coupled — and seamlessly integrated — with the Mandate Management System that provides total automation of the mandate generation, exchange and verification processes between participating banks.
“The Mandate Management System offers banks and billers the ability to initiate and manage e-mandates as a mean to pre-authorise and verify eligible direct debit transactions.”
The scope also includes a Mobile Payment Clearing and Switching System (PS-mpClear), which is a real-time payment switch responsible for processing inter-bank and inter-processor mobile payment transactions. PS-mpClear supports the processing and switching mobile financial and non-financial transactions in Straight Through Processing (STP) basis and routing messages between multiple mobile payment service providers.
This ambitious project award sets only a few months following the award of the Electronic Image-based Check Clearing System Upgrade, which is running in the Sultanate since 2009.