Dr Atiur Rahman, Governor of Bangladesh Bank is seen at the inaugural session of the 12th SAARC Payment Council (SPC) meeting at a hotel in Dhaka Sunday.

Bangladesh Bank Governor Dr Atiur Rahman Sunday said an efficient and secure payment system is a vital component of financial market infrastructure to meet the growing internal and external clearing and payment-settlement needs of the businesses related to government, household and financial sectors.

The BB governor made the remarks while addressing the inaugural session of the 12th SAARC Payment Council (SPC) meeting in the city.

He said the SAARC Payments Council promotes collaboration and mutual assistance in reforms and development of the national payments systems in line with the international standard to expedite trade and investment flows in the region.

Bangladesh Bank hosted the day-long event at the Pan Pacific Sonargaon Hotel aiming at making bilateral payments among the SAARC member countries faster and easier and finding ways to address the challenges emerging in the process of global technological adoption in the financial systems.

Atiur further said Bangladesh has attained substantial progress through introducing the fully automated Bangladesh Automated Clearing House (BACH) for inter-bank clearing and settlement of paper based and electronic fund transfers, with rules and procedures conforming to CPSS core principles.

Clearing and settlement processes of paperless electronic fund transfers have the additional important feature of being greener or more ecologically suitable than the traditional paper based processes, he added.

He said, “our next medium term goal will be to put in place an Real time gross settlement systems (RTGS) for real time settlements over the medium term as high value transactions increase in number and volume”.

He also observed that SAARC member economies of diverse size and structure are understandably at different stages of payments system development.

The governor observed that deliberations in this SPC forum are proving useful in learning from each other’s experiences that may help speed up the eventual cross border interlinking of electronic fund transfer channels of all member countries.

Central bank officials from seven other SAARC countries — Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka participated in the day-long program.

Representatives from each country presented a separate country presentation in the meeting, highlighting the progress and updated payment system of their country.

According to a BB statement, governors of the SAARC Finance Group approved the proposal of setting up of the SAARC Payments Initiative (SPI) in October 2007. According to this decision of the SAARC Payments Council (SPC), the apex body responsible for policy making SAARC Payment Initiative (SPI) was established.

The SPI is a regional payment group formed by central banks or monetary authorities of the SAARC Finance Group to help each other reform national payment and settlement systems (PSS) individually and collectively.

The initiative of establishing the SPI was originated at the SAARC Finance Conference on “Towards a Regional Payment Group” held in Colombo in July 2007.

Bangladesh Bank is hosting the SAARC payment council meeting for a second time. Earlier, it hosted the 7th Meeting of SAARC Payments Council on March 28 in 2010.

News: The Daily Sun/Bangladesh/19-Nov-12