Accra, Aug. 8, GNA - The Bank of Ghana (BoG), has given commercial banks up to the end of 2016 to complete certification and be hooked unto the Ghana Instant Pay (GIP) platform.
Speaking at a stakeholders’ meeting to deliberate on the use of instant pay, Mr Archie Hesse, the Chief Executive Officer GhIPSS said the BoG had to defer the initial deadline of August to allow the banks to be in the position to complete the process.
The meeting created a platform for GhIPSS to interact with stakeholders on GIP and to explain to them its potential as a viable business line for financial institutions and how it could facilitate business transactions for enterprises and companies.
Currently, seven banks are fully certified on GhIPSS Instant Pay and six are currently live while other nine banks are also partially certified and three were live with partial certification.
Mr Hesse said the world is moving fast and there is the urgent need not to short change customers but to develop payment systems, which are instant and equally very fast.
He said speed, convenience and safety are key things that made GhIPSS to come out with the instant pay to smoothen the lives of customers and businesses.
He said it is not only frustrating to be told to go to designated places only to pay when the transaction could easily be done by the touch of a button.
“So instant payment has great benefits to the productivity of the country. Banks would get their floats quicker, the government would enjoy liquidity and liquidity would be everywhere. Everything would be more efficient than it really is now,” he said.
Mr Archie called on the BoG to make it mandatory for all banks to have the facility to receive instant pay as is the case in Europe and Nigeria.
“It is imperative and important for the country. But instant pay is just the building block but what is important is the product and services that we would develop around the instant pay system,” he added.
Dr Settor Amediku, the Head of Payments Systems, BoG said some financial institutions have notified the Bank on effort being made to achieve certification before the end of the year.
He said the BoG would continue to support the development of products and services that have the potential to serve as catalyst for growth in the financial sector and efficiency in the payment system.
Dr Amediku said with Instant Pay, businesses and financial institutions have the opportunity to minimise fraud in revenue collection and bring efficiency in collection effort.
GIP is a service on the gh-link platform, which allows payments to be sent across financial institutions electronically from one bank account to the other as a single immediate payment.
With GIP, customers of banks could transfer money from their bank accounts to accounts of beneficiaries in another bank instantly. GIP guarantees real time payment.
The initiative is part of efforts by GhIPSS to modernise the country’s payment system in line with the cash-lite agenda.
Speaking at the breakfast meeting, Mr Dapo Adeosun, Customer Relationship Management, NIP, said the use of the Instant Pay is growing all over the world.
He said Nigeria had made enough progress in the use of the system and called on Ghanaian stakeholders to embrace it.
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