Cellphones to accounts link?

The linking of bank accounts to easy-to-remember identifiers such as mobile numbers and e-mail addresses is said to be under consideration in an overhaul of the National Payments System.

Industry stakeholders, including the central bank, commercial banks, payments association and facilitator of interbank settlements, are working to upgrade the current system, developed in the 1980s.

The various stakeholders are understood to have had a two-day meeting last week to explore options and discuss the scope of the planned upgrade.

Carlo Palmers at SWIFT, told Moneyweb the team is closely monitoring new payment systems implemented in a number of countries, with a particular focus on the new payments platform that went live in Australia last month.

“Australia has very consciously rethought their project from looking just at instant payments to a new payments platform. A new payments platform means that they are building a new infrastructure that can cater for any type of transaction so instant payments and many other transaction types would go through the system.”

Enabling instant payments, or at least reducing transaction processing speeds, is a consideration in SA. This is in line with retail market expectations, driven by consumers’ ability to purchase and pay for goods online almost instantaneously.

Another consideration is the linking of bank accounts to mobile numbers and e-mail addresses – a key feature of the Australian system. The system allows consumers to make payments to each other using mobile numbers and e-mail addresses instead of a bank account number, which can be complicated and difficult to remember.

To use the Australian system, account holders must register their personal information on a proxy database, which forms the link between mobile number and/or e-mail address and bank account, all while shielding underlying bank account numbers. Only account holders may link their bank account number to their mobile number and e-mail address and the proxy database has the “highest level of security”, said Palmers.

He said the SA banking community is exploring a similar system using easy-to-remember mobile account numbers in lieu of bank account numbers to help boost financial inclusion.