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Creating a payment clearing infrastructure blueprint for the central bank and commercial banks in Namibia |
The Namibian banks launched an initiative to develop a domestic payment clearing infrastructure for Namibia. A team, representing the Namibian commercial banks and the Bank of Namibia, participated in a strategy development process to create a blueprint for a national clearing infrastructure. The clearing infrastructure would support a variety of payment instruments and would settle in central bank money through the Namibian RTGS system.
At the time, Namibia did not have a domestic clearing system and depended on the South African clearing processes to determine the interbank obligations and final settlement figures. Seeing that Namibia was in the process of introducing its own domestic RTGS system, the opportunity to also explore the viability of a domestic clearing infrastructure for Namibian Dollar payments was examined.
The approach adopted by Perago, appointed as consultants and process facilitators, was to identify the payment instruments required by the Namibian banks and to determine what the Namibian banking industry wanted to achieve. The process followed the strategic approach to clearly define and reach consensus on its payment infrastructure vision, fundamental principles, success factors, strategies to achieve its vision, as well as roles and responsibilities.
Results achieved:
- The concept of a single clearing engine
A conceptual model of a so-called clearing engine was produced. This clearing engine would process all payments processed between customers of different banks and utilise the same set of generic clearing and settlement routines.
- A clearly defined set of payment instruments
As a result of an analysis of payment instruments utilised at the time, as well as new instruments envisaged by the banks, a generic set of payment instruments were identified based on the categorisation of instruments according to payment utility or purpose, rather than the underlying payment mechanism.
- A national blueprint for the establishment of a domestic payment clearing infrastructure
The project produced an industry agreement and national strategy for the establishment of a new payment clearing infrastructure, independent from the South African system, for the processing of Namibian Dollar denominated payments.
- Request for Proposal documentation for the issuing of tenders
The project concluded with completion of the issuing of detailed requirement specifications for the provision of solutions and services. The specifications contained the business requirements, processing requirements, technical hardware specification and network specification.
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