The governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Rogério Zandamela, is meeting with the heads of commercial banks this Friday, 17 May. The meeting is taking place against a backdrop of failures in the bank payment system.
According to a press release published by the newspaper O País, the meeting, which will take place at the institution’s headquarters in Maputo city, is scheduled for 1.15pm and will be open to the media.
In recent weeks, the Single National Electronic Payments Network, managed by Sociedade Interbancária de Moçambique (SIMO), has presented recurrent failures in which, in extreme cases, bank account holders lose sums of money.
Reacting, the Confederation of Economic Associations (CTA) of Mozambique denounced the failures of the new single electronic payment network as causing ‘incalculable losses’, constituting a ‘step backwards’ in the system and leading to informality in the economy.
‘The instability of the transaction payment system is having a negative and significant impact on the economy and on the confidence of users of the national financial system,’ said the president of the CTA’s Information and Communication Technologies and Financial Services department, Paulo Oliveira.
Without specifying the amounts, he explained that the failures are causing ‘very high losses of thousands of meticals’, affecting sectors such as hotels, tourism and catering, causing a drop in business and leading to ‘unproductivity’ in the economy.
In November, the Bank of Mozambique announced that all the country’s commercial banks and electronic money institutions had finalised integration into the new single national electronic payments network, provided by Euronet, five years after a ‘blackout’ on the previous platform.
‘With the new platform, Sociedade Interbancária de Moçambique (SIMO) is now aligned with international payment system standards, which impose “contactless” technology for all bank cards and POS terminals, offering greater security and convenience for users,’ the central bank explained at the time.
‘The new platform has the advantage of offering a diverse range of products and services, with an emphasis on interoperability between e-money institutions, banks and other financial service providers,’ it emphasised.
