KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has advised banks to complete development of portals, on-boarding and educating their customers and discontinue paper-based submission of foreign exchange related cases latest by June 30, 2021.

In order to further 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, State Bank has advised all banks to implement digital portals for end-to-end digitalization of case submission and processing.

In the first step of its end-to-end digitalization drive, SBP launched an online platform - Regulatory Approval System (RAS) to facilitate banks in online submission of foreign exchange 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.

To further extend the digitalization drive, enhance operational efficiency and transparency, promote ease of doing business and make case submission cost effective and environment friendly, SBP encouraged ADs to develop their own portals to connect their customers. For the purpose, Authorized Dealers (Ads) were advised to provide an online platform to their customers to submit the Foreign Exchange (FX) cases digitally, thus abolishing paper-based case submission.

In this background, twenty-one (21) banks have already developed their portals and started on-boarding their customers besides receiving cases digitally, while the rest of the banks are in the development phase and customers’ on-boarding is under way.

As the end-to-end digitalization of foreign exchange related case submission is the SBP’s priority, going forward, SBP has decided that paper-based submission of FX related cases to ADs by their customers would be discontinued.

Accordingly, SBP has advised the banks to complete development of portals, on-boarding and educating their customers for the same and discontinue paper-based submission of foreign exchange related cases to them by their clients latest by June 30, 2021. It has further been advised that banks must make comprehensive arrangements for any contingency and ensure business continuity in case of disruption in their portals. SBP has advised ADs to bring the fresh instructions to the knowledge of all their constituents and ensure meticulous compliance of the same. In case of failure, the relevant ADs may not be able to provide all the foreign exchange related services to their customers resulting in reputational risk and business loss for the concerned ADs besides exposing them to regulatory action under the applicable laws.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021