Bangladesh Bank will host the 12th Saarc Payment Council (SPC) meeting with the central bank officials of eight Saarc countries at Sonargaon Hotel in Dhaka today.

BB Governor Atiur Rahman will inaugurate the meeting, according to a statement of Bangladesh Bank.

BB previously also hosted the seventh meeting of the council on March 28, 2010, and the meeting is usually held twice in a year and rotates among the member countries on consensus basis.

Bangladesh Bank is hosting the council meeting with a wider vision of cooperation among the member countries especially in the area of legal and regulatory reforms, oversight policy and framework and in-frastructural development of payment systems.

Saarc Payments Initiative (SPI) is a regional payment group formed by the member central banks/ monetary authorities of the SAARCFINANCE Group to help each other to reform national payment and settlement systems (PSS) individually and regional PSS collectively.

The initiative of establi-shing the SPI was originated at the SAARCFINANCE Conference on �Towards a Regional Payment

Group� held in Colombo in July 2007.

News: The Daily Star/Bangladesh/18-Nov-12