Real time banking system coming

The plan to implement a system through which banking institutions can carry out transactions in real time is still in the works and could be in place sometime early in 2022.

Minister in the Ministry of Finance Ryan Straughn gave that assurance as he introduced the Fair Credit Reporting Bill, 2021 in the House of Assembly.

In December last year, Straughn said the Automated Clearing House (ACH) would have been in place by November 2021.
But he told his Parliamentary colleagues on Tuesday that work continues on making the ACH a reality.

“I know it seems like it’s taking forever but the movement to the real-time ACH, where I can pay you from institution ‘A’ to institution ‘Z’ and it happens instantaneously, that is where we are trying to get to so that the finality of payment and the validation is clear. That is a work in progress but it is something that I hope we can bring to finality early in the New Year in order to move forward,” he said.

Straughn said once the ACH is implemented, the situation of banking transactions made outside regular opening hours not being registered until a financial institution reopens will be a thing of the past.

“So that it doesn’t matter whether the bank is open or not. I make reference to the banks only because the banks in our current system also function as payment service providers. We have to disentangle the operational side of the bank from that of being a payment service provider, bringing it into real time, so that a lot of these issues that we have been confronted with in the past, that these will go away and put us in a position where business can be transacted in real time and that we are in a position then to really transform the economy,” he explained.

Minister Straughn said the changes which institutions will have to make to be part of the ACH will lead to improvement in the service to the public.
(DP)