The Rwanda Franc will now be used to directly transact in goods and services from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Business persons have been enduring the pain of having to exchange the national currency into the Dollar or currencies of countries where they are transacting from.

This means more than just the foreign exchange charges as traders lose time and other resources in such fulfillments.

The burden is no more after the central bank adopted the East African Payment System (EAPS), a regional Real Time Gross Settlement System that allows payments to be carried out using local currencies of subscribing member countries of the Community.

Only Burundi is yet to join the EAPS as it has to do some infrastructural adjustments.

Although the system is electronic and will mean beneficiaries have to bear the burden of using computers to effect, EAPS is a milestone in the efforts to harmonise and integrate the payment system to enhance cross-border trade.

With the click of a mouse, either at the bank or on personal computers, a trader will efficiently effect transactions across the borders to the subscribed countries.

Also eliminated are time and the risks that take place whenever traders travel on the road with big sums of money. There are times when such traders have been ambushed by robbers and lost their investment capital. The EAPS will ensure such occurrences are like bad dreams experienced by robbers.

Until the EAPS revolution, any payment from, say Kampala, went through Brussels before being rerouted to Kigali, Dar es Salaam or Nairobi using SWIFT, resulting into unnecessary delays.

This is a milestone businesspersons have to capitalise on to ease their transactions across the borders. With each plausible integration development, policymakers should look for more of such life-changing milestones that will take the Community to greater heights and better serve the citizens.