Karachi: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) recently instructed all the country’s banks to offer PayPak cards to their customers on a priority basis, a news source reported. As per the publication, in order to improve the acceptance of payment cards in Pakistan, the central bank has also introduced three steps for the banking industry to follow for enhancing the digital payment services landscape in Pakistan, along with promoting financial inclusion.
The SBP has introduced the following steps for this purpose:
All banks are now bound to offer domestic
payment scheme card ‘PayPak’ to their customers as the first priority.
Meanwhile, the banks can issue the international payment schemes like MasterCard,
Visa, and Union Pay upon the customer’s request
Banks will now charge the Merchant Discount Rate
(MDR) within the range of 1.5% and 2.5%. Previously, banks could charge any fee
to the merchants
SBP has rationalised the distribution of
revenues, generated from a merchant, among the players including the card
issuer, card machine deploying entity, and the payment scheme company. This
measure will keep the incentives equitable among all the stakeholders
Furthermore, SBP has identified a gap in cheque clearing where it took weeks to clear cheques originating from far-flung areas of the country. To resolve this issue, the central bank has allowed the use of Pakistan Real Time Interbank Settlement Mechanism (PRISM). With this allowance, the processing time for clearing cheques in areas not easily accessible will decrease significantly — also helping the financial institutions in these areas to access digital channels.
Previously, SBP had introduced the National Payment Systems Strategy
in November 2019. Since then, it has continued to take steps for promotion of
digitalisation of payment transactions in Pakistan.
