Banks to implement digital portals

KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has advised all banks to implement digital portals for end-to-end digitalisation of case submission and processing, a statement said on Tuesday.

This move aims to facilitate the business community in Pakistan, promote ease of doing business, enhance operational efficiency and make processing of foreign exchange (FX) related cases cost effective and environment friendly.

In the first leg of its end-to-end digitalisation drive, the SBP launched an online platform - Regulatory Approval System (RAS) to facilitate banks in online submission of FX-related cases to the Exchange Policy Department (EPD) of SBP and the Foreign Exchange Operations Department (FEOD) of the SBP Banking Service Corporation (SBP BSC). The SBP-RAS has been operational since March 24, 2020 whereby banks are submitting their cases online to FEOD and manual case submission has been discontinued. Later on, paper based case submission to EPD by banks was also discontinued with effect from August 28, 2020.

In the next leg of its digitalisation drive, SBP instructed banks to develop portals to facilitate their customers for online submission of cases to banks and abolish paper based case submission. In this background, 21 banks have already developed their portals and started onboarding their customers besides receiving cases digitally, while the rest of the banks are in the development phase and customers’ onboarding is underway.