Dr. Atiur Rahman
Governor, Bangladesh Bank :
You all know that the development of a safe and efficient national payment system has relevance for the monetary policy, financial stability and overall economic development of the country. Bangladesh Bank-the central bank of the country, therefore, has given emphasis to establish a state of art payment systems as a part of its inclusive digitization initiative for last several years. BB’s inclusive digitization initiative include development of a modern and efficient automated banking system, creation of institutional arrangements for payment services and payment infrastructures and thereby stimulating a coordinated effort among the banking sector, regulatory agencies and other relevant stakeholders. BB even collaborated with the other central banks and international agencies to improve and standardize the payment systems of the country.
Bangladesh, the land of ample opportunities and hope, is on board to create a fully automated, easy to access, affordable payment systems to increase the pace of financial inclusion activities. Bangladesh Bank introduced Bangladesh Automated Clearing House (BACH), National Payment Switch Bangladesh (NPSB) and Mobile Financial Services (MFS) to broaden the range of payment instruments and services. BB is also very keenly engaged for improving the interoperability and resiliency of banking, payment and securities infrastructures. Recently Bangladesh Bank implemented Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) allowing us immediate payments settlements on an individual order basis without netting to fulfill the requirement of a high value payment system in the country. With a focus to the future, system is open to both VPN and SWIFT connectivity, next gen fin language ISO20022 is chosen as the message format. I would like to thank all the participating banks, my colleagues of Bangladesh Bank, vendors and all other concern who were related with the project implementation. I also would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Asian Development Bank for being with us in this endeavor.
Recognizing the positive linkage between technology and sustainable growth, we at Bangladesh Bank, developed and implemented broad based Networking, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Banking Application, Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), Open Data Initiatives, a highly interactive Website and Intranet, E-tendering, E-recruitment and many other in-house software. Whole financial sector enthusiastically embraced the changes and induced itself with core banking solution, online banking, designing new products, customer friendly apps and so forth. Along with this physical establishment of infrastructure, BB has a concern about the regulatory aspects too. BB already circulated guidelines for every single payment platform. A payment systems act is under formulation to better contain legal, operational, financial and systemic risks and to create more suitable oversight and regulatory regimes for the national payment systems.
Financial literacy is a prerequisite for optimum exploitation of any new payment initiatives. Today’s seminar is a timely effort to disseminate various aspects of RTGS, in conjunction with other already launched platform.
