KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) have joined hands to promote branchless banking through mobile devices.
Addressing the 9th international mobile commerce conference ‘Mobicash Mobile Commerce 2016’, jointly organised by Total Communications and two other regulators, SBP Governor Ashraf Mahmood Wathra said that the central bank and PTA were working jointly to enable interoperability among existing branchless banks in the country. “We are creating facilities that make financial transactions possible from a branchless bank account on a mobile phone network to another one,” he said.
The SBP governor said the project of enabling interoperability has reached an advanced stage. “The implementation may take more time,” he said. He said they have also developed an online application named Agentchex. This would help monitor branchless bank account agents activities and transaction activities to avoid misuse of the funds being transferred.
The aggregate network of branchless banking agents has reached almost 300,000 across Pakistan up to December 2015, he said. ‘Currently, nine branchless banking deployments are live in the market, while four banks are on pilot roll out phase,” Wathra said.
Up to December 2015, over 15 million customers held branchless banking accounts. For the last three quarters, about 100 million transactions amounting up to Rs500 billion were carried out on average in each quarter in the branchless banking system. “The average size of mobile banking transactions is around Rs5,200,” he said.
PTA Chairman Dr Syed Ismail Shah said higher rate of taxation was one of the major hurdles in the way of branchless banking. “However, the finance minister has listened to us in detail on the issue this time. I hope for a meaningful outcome, as the government is considering our budget proposals,’ he said.
He urged branchless bankers to develop value-added services for the existing account-holders to speed up growth in the sector. Besides, they may continue efforts to bring-in unbanked people into the system.
He said mobile phone banking was not a petty development. “This is a complete banking system developed with IT and telecom revolution,” he said.
There was a perception that branchless banking was developed to facilitate only the poor segment of the society, which was incorrect, he said.
