BEFTN started its Live Operation since February, 2011 with
a view to establish a paper-less electronic payment method for secured &
cost-effective transaction. BEFTN is a faster and efficient alternative to
paper-based clearing and settlement system. Recently, the upgraded version of
Bangladesh Automated Clearing House (BACH) has launched which facilitates
clearing and settlement of electronic fund transfer twice a day. A wide range
of credit transfers such as salary payment, foreign and domestic remittances,
social safety net payments, interest and principal payment of Sanchayapatra,
company dividends, retirement benefits could be settled through EFT credits
while utility bill payments, loan repayments, insurance premiums, corporate to
corporate
payments could be accommodated in EFT debits. Bangladesh
Government is an early adopter of the EFT network, in each month around 2-2.5
million government payments are made through EFT network for salaries of
government officials, social safety net payments like; old age allowance,
allowances for the widow, destitute and deserted women, allowances for the
financially insolvent disabled.
Established
in 2010, Bangladesh Automated Clearing House operates two inter-bank payment
wings - the Bangladesh Automated Cheque Processing System (BACPS) and the
Bangladesh Electronic Funds
Transfer
Network (BEFTN). Both the systems operate in batch processing and Deferred Net
Settlement (DNS) mode. The central BACH system receives transactions (through
instruments or instructions) from the member banks in 24/7 basis while these
are processed and settled at a pre-fixed time. After each clearing cycle a
single multilateral netting figure on each participating bank is settled by
posting
it
to their respective account maintained with Bangladesh Bank. The system is
based on a centralized processing centre at Bangladesh Bank, Head Office, Dhaka
and a Near Data Centre (NDC) at Mirpur.
Bangladesh Automated
Cheque Processing Systems (BACPS)
BACPS
uses the Cheque Imaging and Truncation (CIT) technology for clearing the
paper-based instruments (i.e. cheque, pay order, dividend and refund warrants,
etc) electronically. This electronic cheque presentment technique made possible
to bring the whole country under single clearing umbrella. The clearing cycle
has been brought down to t+1 for regular value cheques and t+0 for high value
cheques.