A rapid rise in usage of the new national instant payment platform BIMPay has pushed transactions past one million and $2bn within weeks of its launch, with the Central Bank reporting improving system performance and fewer failed payments.
Deputy Governor Michelle Doyle told a press conference on Thursday called to review the island’s economic performance for the first half of this year that, up to Wednesday, some 1.3 million transactions were processed on the BimPay platform since its launch in mid-June.
“That equates to $2.2bn in value; and obviously, those numbers are encouraging for us. More importantly, though, when we look at the level of time-outs, which is where the responsiveness of participants to payment messages being sent, we have seen that that continues to fall. So, it’s closer to zero, to approximately 0.3 per cent of all transactions. So, we know we are moving in the right direction in terms of the system stabilising.”
She said another key aspect affecting individuals making payments was the rejection rate, which has also dropped under the new system.
“That is where… a payment has incorrectly formatted payment details, or where the payment is being sent to the incorrect account, the system therefore rejects it, those numbers are coming down, which means we know we are moving in the right direction in terms of the system stabilising performance on the payments rail is improving.”
As the month of July drew to a close, the bank’s focus has been on ensuring that monthly salary and pension payments go through with less friction compared to last month, said Doyle.
“As of [Wednesday], the [National Insurance and Social Security Service], confirmed that with regard to government’s pensions as well as the NISSS’s own pensions, that the files that were uploaded, went through successfully, so that, it means the pensioners on the file would have received not only their pensions, but also the living allowance. So, that was good news.
“Similarly, the Accountant General is still processing the public sector salary payments; both the final bi-monthly and monthly; and those have an acceptance rate of about 99 per cent thus far. Between today and tomorrow, we will see where those numbers land. So, there are improvements that we have noted.”
The deputy governor attributed the developments largely to participants refining their payment details, making corrections and doing so promptly, sometimes even before submitting payments on the platform.
She continued: “The other key point that we have made… publicly relates to the [BIMPay] wallet. And even though it’s a smaller component of what is processed on the rail, we continue to see that, of the approximately 27 000 downloaded wallets, only about 57 per cent of those have completed the onboarding process where the wallet is linked to an account at a participant.”
She encouraged the public to continue downloading the BIMPay wallet app.
“For those of you who have started the process, to similarly complete the onboard[ing] today or as soon as you can.”
The deputy governor told journalists the Central Bank will continue to tweak the system to improve the app’s functionality, as she hinted at next steps in the payment system’s development:
“We want to stabilise in terms of implementation; and to get to this stage, we have had to be super focused, as a regulator, on the participants’ implementation process, their consumer protection provisions, the standardisation of where the BIMPay token is located and accessible to the public, as well as some of the more general around how this system is made available and rolled out to the public in terms of functionality.”
She added: “We are closer than we were in terms of completing the remediation and teething issues; and that is critical, because, at the end of the day, we need to move to phase two of the project, which is something that we will indicate in due course.”
Phase two of the BiMPay implementation is anticipated to include onboarding smaller credit unions and alternative payment service providers, integrating government agencies such as NISSS, introducing corporate and business fee structures, and eventually linking the e-wallet to the chip-and-PIN Trident national identification card.
(EJ)
