Punjab Finance Department’s Special Secretary Muhammad Ali Randhawa and State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Finance Director Qader Baksh signed an MoU to launch Raast On e-Pay Punjab with Punjab Finance Minister in chair.
Punjab Finance Department’s Special Secretary Muhammad Ali Randhawa and State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Finance Director Qader Baksh signed an MoU to launch Raast On e-Pay Punjab with Punjab Finance Minister in chair. The MoU was signed at an event held at Punjab Civil Secretariat, Lahore.
RAAST- Pakistan’s First Instant Payment System, launched in January 2021 by SBP. Raast is a flagship initiative of SBP, which provides simple, fast, low-cost, interoperable and secure electronic payment platform for instant processing of high volume retail payments. Raast also has the ability to make payments to multiple beneficiaries at a time in order to cater high volume government payments like salaries, pension and social security payments.
Pakistan has had low electronic transactions for a number of reasons including low banking penetration, lack of trust and awareness of digital payment methods, limited interoperability, difficult accessibility and high cost of transactions. The Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) of Pakistan provides instant payment settlements for large value and corporate transactions only Raast. Pakistan’s Instant Payment System will facilitate retail payment settlements with much great efficiency.
Through this system Government of Punjab will disburse payments digitally to Citizens and Businesses directly in their accounts i.e. Vendor payments, wheat procurement payments, subsidies, salaries, pensions, PSPA grants, etc. This will put an end to the old and cumbersome system of making payments through treasury cheques.
Finance Minister Muhammad applauded PITB for devising initiatives to make lives of people easier. PITB IT-Ops Director General Faisal Yousaf briefed the audience about the IT interventions rolled out by PITB including Raast On e-Pay Punjab and apprised as to how these technologies are providing user-friendly services to the citizens. Director Finance Qader Baksh assured of cooperation with all the parties to extend the services of Raast Payment Gateway to Government of Punjab. The parties have agreed to use Raast Payment Gateway enabling Government of Punjab to send the payments using the Electronic Fund Transfers mode.