Central Bank joins with World Bank to modernize nation’s payment system

Dec 16, 2016 News

-Says Reform would lead to Govt. saving up to $226M
To continue the enhancement of the financial system, the Bank of Guyana, with the

Central Bank Governor, Dr. Gobind Ganga

assistance of the World Bank, will undertake a comprehensive and strategic modernization of Guyana’s National Payment System to advance the use of electronic payments.
This is according to Central Bank Governor, Dr. Gobind Ganga.
During his press conference yesterday, Dr Ganga made reference to a 2015 payments cost study conducted by the World Bank’ Payment Systems Development Group (PSDG).
The document says that the Government of Guyana could save up to $266 million (0.04 % of GDP) annually by switching from paper-based payment mechanisms to electronic payments.
Additionally, Dr. Ganga revealed that the Bank of Guyana will play the lead role in this project with the active cooperation of major stakeholders. He said that the government is a major stakeholder since it is the single largest end-user of payment services.
He said that the Ministry of Finance, the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and the Ministry of Social Protection (MSP) manage the largest of the outgoing payment programmes. The Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the NIS, both quasi-government agencies, manage the largest inflows.
Excluding revenue collection, the Central Bank Governor said that the programmes managed by the Finance Ministry, NIS and MSP account for an estimated 260,000 payments a month (a daily average of over 11,000) and over $3M a year.
He said that other stakeholders, include Commercial Banks, Money Transfer Agencies and the Business Community.
Over the next four years, Dr. Ganga said that the Bank of Guyana will undertake payments system regulatory reform and infrastructure development to achieve several objectives.
He said that these include the establishment of legal clarity and certainty to cover several areas such as electronic funds transfer, e-money and cheque truncation; the enhancement of payment processing and reduction of settlement times for both retail and large value transactions.
With the reform process; the Bank also hopes to strengthen risk management and mitigation across the National Payment System; expand accessibility of electronic payment access networks; attract higher rates electronic payment acceptance by vendors, merchants and other providers of goods and services and advance migration of government to electronic payments for both the collections and disbursement of funds.
The Central Bank Governor said that the successful implementation of this programme will lead to benefits in several areas.

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