KARACHI: State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Sunday announced successful integration of Central Directorate of National Savings (CDNS) with Raast payment system.
“Now customers of CDNS can receive their payments directly into their bank accounts without going to branches,” the SBP said.
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Through this integration with Raast, customers receive their payments in bank accounts in a free, fast and secure way. This will make life easier for those interested in saving schemes, the central bank said.
CDNS is the first Government entity on-boarded on Raast that will greatly extend SBP’s efforts to digitize payments in Pakistan.
Raast is Pakistan’s first instant payment system that has enabled end-to-end digital payments among individuals, businesses and government entities instantaneously.
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The state-of-the-art Pakistan’s Faster Payment System has been used to settle small-value retail payments in real time while at the same time provide a cheap and universal access to all players in the financial industry including commercial banks, microfinance banks, government entities and fintechs (EMIs & PSPs).
Pakistan has had low electronic transactions for a number of reasons including low banking penetration, lack of trust and awareness of digital payment methods, limited interoperability, difficult accessibility and high cost of transactions. The Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) of Pakistan provides instant payment settlements for large value and corporate transactions only.
Recently, the SBP withdrew transactional limits of payments made through Raast System i.e. Raast Person-to-Person (P2P) Payment System.
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The SBP issued Circular No. 02 dated March 15, 2022 and stated that to further facilitate users of Raast services it has been decided that with effect from April 1, 2022, there will be no transactional limits on Raast system by SBP.
Banks/MFBs/EMIs may however set, in their system Raast transaction limits for their customers based on their risk profile in compliance with the relevant Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Counter Financing of Terrorism (CFT) requirements.
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Further, through previous Circular No. 01 dated February 03, 2022, in terms of para 3 (f) of the circular, customer transaction limits for Raast payments shall not be less than Rs.200,000/- per transaction or the transaction limits applicable as per the account type and prescribed by SBP from time to time.
The aggregate customer limit assigned to Raast payments shall not be less than the Interbank Fund Transfer (IBFT) limit, the SBP said.
