Experts call for interoperability across financial institutions

Experts in the finance sector have said that the country have reckoned interoperability between different financial institutions as a major step towards achieving a digital economy. Financial interoperability is the ability for different financial systems to connect with one another, so that customers can find it easy to send and receive payments across different financial institutions without spending much and tiresome processes. According to experts, the country should move in a direction of unilateral ties among financial institutions, a move that will enable clients to seamlessly make transfers from banks to mobile platforms and vice versa. Financial service providers as well should be able to share agents so that an agent for a particular bank or mobile money platform can serve clients of other institutions in the same way; and clients should be able to make payments using their mobile phones by scanning QR codes in their respective retail transactions. The National Bank of Rwanda has since 2018 intensified efforts towards the cause as a way to enhance efficiency of retail payments, improve customer experience, and create opportunities to increase transaction volumes. In its 2018 blueprint, BNR tipped interoperability to directly contribute to the objectives of a cashless and inclusive economy by facilitating the sharing of payment infrastructure, which in turn reduces the costs to service providers and allows them to compete based on products and services, rather than on capital-intensive infrastructure. It also urged that it increases the utility of digital payment solutions for end-users, creating network effects that bring an increasing number of consumers into the system; as well as reducing the costs to end-users as it lowers the barriers for service providers to participate in the payment system, thereby fostering competition and innovation in the market. Innocent Kaneza, Senior Consultant at ESICIA, a Rwandan based company that specialises in software development and system integration highlighted the advantage of interoperability in giving clients services without discrimination between financial companies “An agent does not have to say, ‘here we only accept MTN or only Airtel.’ A customer should be able to go to any agent, pay for a service and get what he wants,” he said. For this standardization of services, experts say that there needs to be efforts for more talk to tell different actors about the benefits of interoperability. Innocent Muhizi, the CEO of Rwanda Information Society (RISA) echoed the need for different sectors to sit on a round table to understand the phenomenon, as well as getting down to the basics in terms processes involved and the technologies to be used. He also suggested that the country’s finance sector needs to learn from the experiences of other countries, “Of course there are certain things that we are not sure about, so we have to look at other places where it has happened, and see how evolved and what pitfalls they went through so that we avoid them.” Jean-Claude Gaga, the CEO of R-Switch, an e-payments solution company serving as the national e-payment switch of Rwanda said that “For the first time the word interoperability is seeing real meaning in Rwanda,” as last year the National Bank of Rwanda sat down with Financial experts and came up with a blue print showcasing a basic way forward for pursuing it. editor@newtimesrwanda.com

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Experts call for interoperability across financial institutions