The Director and Head of the Payment Systems Department at the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Dr Amediku Settor has urged Ghanaian commercial banks to work with the Pan African Payment Settlement System (PAPSS) to enhance cross-border payments to boost intra-Africa trade.
He encouraged the banks to take the necessary steps to be on the platform as it would provide them with additional income.
Dr Settor was speaking at the PAPSS roadshow organised in Accra for representatives of banks and other financial institutions.
Dr Settor said Banks played a crucial role in trade through the provision of financial services to businesses and the banks needed to adopt initiatives that would ease the stress businesses go through in facilitating trade across borders.
PAPSS is a cross-border, financial market infrastructure, enabling payment transactions across Africa.
Dr Settor explained that banks needed to diversify their sources of income and not only focus on revenue generated from corporate and retail banking.
He called on all banks that were yet to get on board PAPSS to join the train, saying “What you need to do is to write to us at the payment system department. We will review your request and let you go ahead.”
Head of Product and Business Development at PAPSS, Monica Oraro said consumers or customers would gain by way of lower costs, speedy transactions and swift validation of client information.
“Making payments through PAPSS is considerably lower than what else is on the market today; secondly payments go in a very timely way, some of the transactions we’ve done so far we have seen that it can be between 7 and 20 seconds,” she argued.
Madam Oraro said the patronage of PAPSS had mostly had to do with trade transactions and also capital market transactions.
She disclosed that “we have had investors in Nigeria investing in the Ghana Stock Exchange making their payments through us, we have also had a number of entities that are doing exports being able to make their payments through PAPSS.”
Chief Executive Officer of PAPSS, Mr. Mike Ogbalu III said, “With the coming of the African Continental Free Trade Area, it became clear that we as a people needed a payment system that we as a people can control and govern however the existing payment system far from supported Africa’s trade, hence the introduction of PAPSS.”