The central bank has imposed service charge on clearing automated cheque for the first time to afford the operational and maintenance costs of automated cheque processing system launched two-year back. The service charge will be effective from January next year and will remain enforce for one year, said a Bangladesh Bank (BB) press release issued on Tuesday.

A bank has to pay VAT (value added tax) worth Tk 25 to the central bank and that the respective bank will
realise Tk 50 from its clients for any high value cheque, the BB said.

In case of regulatory value cheque clearing, bank has to pay Tk 5.0 as VAT and will realise Tk 7.0 from their clients, it said.

And in case of any electronic funds transfer network, bank has to pay Tk 5.0 as VAT and will realise Tk 7.0 from their clients, it added.

The BB introduced Bangladesh Automated Clearing House (BACH) with the financial assistance of British donor agency DFID to modernise the payment system infrastructure.

With its two wings, Bangladesh Automated Cheque Processing System (BACPS) and Bangladesh Electronic Fund Transfer Network, BACH acts as the most sophisticated electronic channel for settling inter bank financial transactions throughout the country.

The BACH has started its operation in October 2010 by replacing the manual cheque clearing system with image and date-based cheque truncation system where Magnetic Ink Character Recognition encoded cheques are exchanged in encrypted form between the participating banks through a secured communication link.

After introducing the system, the high value cheque clearing has doubled and the duration of clearing time has reduced significantly maximising speedy payments, officials said.

Through the automated system, the central bank cleared an average 85,000 regular value cheques and high value cheques worth Tk 4,700 crore in a day.

However, earlier it had taken 7 to 30 days to clear high value cheques.

According to BB, of the total 85,000 cheques, 80,000 are regular value (below Tk 5 lakh) and the remaining 5,000 are high value (worth Tk 5 lakh and above) cheques.

The number of high value cheques rose to 5,000 in the automated system from 2,000 in the manual system, and the number of regular value cheques also increased to 85,000 from 70,000 in the previous system.

News: The Daily Independent/Bangladesh/14-Nov-12