Guyana’s technological landscape will soon be radically transformed as increased efforts are being employed to ensure the realisation of a society with dominance in electronic payments.
Next year, the Bank of Guyana (BoG) will begin the process of modernising the country’s National Payments System to advance the use of electronic payments which could see Guyana saving up to 6 million annually.
The Bank of Guyana will begin the process of modernising the country’s National Payments System
BoG Governor Dr Gobind Ganga told a recent news conference that Central Bank, with assistance from the World Bank, will undertake a comprehensive and strategic transformation of the payment system, to switch from paper-based payment mechanisms to electronic payments.
“The successful implementation of this programme will lead to benefits in several areas; more specifically according to a 2015 payments cost study conducted by the World Bank’s Payment Systems Development Group (PSDG), the Government of Guyana could save up to $266 million or 0.04% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) every year…,” he emphasised.
Over the next four years, BOG will undertake payments system regulatory reform and infrastructure development to achieve a number of objectives of the switch to digital payments.
Dr Ganga said the BoG will aim to establish legal clarity and certainty to cover several areas such as electronic funds transfer, e-money and cheque truncation.
Additionally steps will be made towards enhancing the efficiency of payment processing and the reduction of settlement times for both retail and large value transactions.
The strengthening of risk management and mitigation across the National Payments Stem and the expansion of the accessibility of electronic payment access networks will also be under focus.
Central Bank will also seek to attract higher rates of electronic payment acceptance by vendors, merchants and other providers of goods and services as well as advance the migration of Government to electronic payments for both the collections and disbursement of funds.
Further, the BoG will drive remittance costs down and enhance the accessibility of remittance services, and strengthen the oversight framework and capacity.
Moreover, Central Bank will build stakeholder engagement and cooperation, and support ecommerce.
Public Telecommunications Minister Catherine Hughes in November said Government will be taking major leaps towards development along technological and digital lines by encouraging, through legislation, the use of cards to transact financial businesses.
“We have to start embracing the use of plastic. We have to stop walking with millions of dollars. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world and what we don’t realise is that there is a financial cost to operating financial system so heavily dependent on cash,” the Minister had stated.
In fact, she had expressed hopes of presenting legislation to that effect in Parliament next year: “I’d like to say to you that by the end of 2017, the passport application process should be in a digital format. You should be able to stay at home, apply for your passport and they should get a response from the passport office and they would only have to visit the office to take a photograph and uplift their passport.”
She is also hoping for the same thing for the registry of births and deaths, all other services provided by Government to citizens, “we want to be able to do them online”, she said.
Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan in May had alluded to the benefits of going plastic, noting that it would reduce the crime rate.
In August 2014, then Finance Minister, Dr Ashni Singh, had sought to discourage his fellow countrymen and women from carrying large and bulky amounts of cash.
Among the policies the former Finance Minister’s Government had introduced was the launch of a $5000 bill which reduced the physical bulk of cash and the move for Government ministries and agencies to pay their employees via bank orders; a practice which has been significantly replicated across the Private Sector. (Devina Samaroo)
