Interbank transfers only to pause ahead of BIMPay launch

Barbadians will face a brief overnight halt in interbank money transfers on Friday as the Central Bank switches national payment rails to the new BIMPay platform, with services set to resume early Saturday, Governor Dr Kevin Greenidge said on Tuesday.

But their use of bank cards and cash trips to automated teller machines (ATMs) will continue uninterrupted, he said.

The automated clearing house (ACH) and real-time processing (RTP) interbank systems are to be replaced by the new online payment system, which goes into operation on Saturday.

ACH will go offline permanently at 2 p.m. on Friday, and RTP will shut down from 7 p.m. that evening. At 11:59 p.m., the payment system will switch over to BiMPay with interbank transfers resuming on BiMPay from 1 a.m. Saturday, Dr Greenidge told Barbados TODAY.

He said: “During the transition, any service that uses ACH or RTP to move money between different institutions will be unavailable. In practice, these are the online and mobile banking options customers use to send funds from one bank or credit union to another. Institutions brand these services differently, so where a service such as FirstPay is used to make an interbank transfer over ACH or RTP, that interbank function would be paused during the window.”

Automatic banking machine transactions, point-of-sale transactions, and transfers between accounts within the same bank or credit union will continue as normal, he added.

He also clarified that during the transition from one system to the other on Friday, there will be a temporary interruption to interbank transfers – payments between different financial institutions.

Dr Greenidge repeated: “The simple message is this: if you need to send money from one institution to another on Friday, June 12, complete ACH transactions before 2 p.m. and RTP transactions before 7 p.m. Interbank transfers then resume on BiMPay from 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 13.”

(EJ)