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Central Bank Governor John Rolle said the next step in the bank’s Live Digital initiative – created to empower and encourage greater use of digital options for financial transactions – will be to ensure that there is “tangible improvement” in how fast consumers get paid via digital transactions.

Rolle told Guardian Business yesterday on the sidelines of the African Export–Import Bank’s (Afreximbank) annual meetings, being held at Baha Mar resort, that while the public awareness campaign for the Live Digital initiative is still at the ground level, the next important step for the bank to take – in tandem with the financial institutions – is finding ways to get consumers paid more quickly than they have been in the past.

“The really big deliverable is… working to make certain that you get some tangible improvement in the experience of payments. So that’s also an agenda of work that we’ve scoped. How quickly to get payments to you, how easily you get set up and open up an account. And so, in those respects, there’s more work to do around the process of opening up bank accounts.”

Rolle continued: “I think we’ve done a very good job of defining what the requirements are, and implementation is happening. We also want to improve the experiences for persons opening up business accounts.

“On the speed side, we see some potential for improvement in just how quickly payments are settling now, because if you’re writing a check, there’s an amount of time that you’re probably allowing now for the money to declare.”

Sending a bank transfer is very swift, compared to allowing a check to clear, with some banks offering different levels of speed with regard to the transfer, and this is what the Central Bank wishes to close the gap on.

Rolle added: “It is not a service provider issue, it is an operational issue. So when we talk about the speed of check clearing, or the speed of wire transfers, we’re going to be focusing on what the baseline standards are, and the operations of the financial institutions.

“If a financial institution sends payments through the ACH (Automated Clearing House) or the RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement), it’s automatically relayed to the receiving bank. So, some of the focus is between the time a customer initiates a request and the financial institution relays that requests through the ACH, so that’s a focus that one has to deal with.

“The other focus is that if a message is sent to a financial institution through the ACH, then we’re going to be interested in how quickly on the receiving end it is acted upon.”

Rolle said the digital wallet providers are well ahead of the curve in terms of sending transfers to their customers, and there is a lot that commercial banks can learn from digital wallet providers in that regard.

The Live Digital campaign will continue with a series of town hall meetings scheduled for the Family Islands, and for New Providence in the coming weeks. This will lead up to a September digital conference that will showcase the importance of digital banking in The Bahamas.

“Live Digital is still very much at the early stages. So, we should be able to do some evaluations a few months in. But it’s ground floor level now and we’re very happy in terms of getting started to get the message out.

“The two important elements ahead for us is the respective outreach in the Family Islands. So, I know that our public relations is organizing some of the town halls. So, we expect some town halls between June and July in some of the northern Family Islands. And we have a very important digital expo week in September, in New Providence, where we will have the financial institutions interacting with our commercial clients. So that’s important. But this public education campaign is just one of the elements.”