The Head of Payment Systems at the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), Ehab Nasr, said the CBE works within a large team in the government regarding digital transformation under the umbrella of the National Council of Payments.
“The bank works within a general framework to produce a national payment card ‘Meza card’. We aim to increase the number of this card’s users to about 20 million over the next two years, and provide 1m acceptance points within three years,” Nasr told Daily News Egypt.
He pointed out that the digital security is a big dimension that we are working on, we have been working on establishing cybersecurity risk incident centre. It will be the first defence line for banks in digital transformation. It will be responsible for monitoring any digital fraud incident in banks, so that they can to take precautions.
The National Payments Council has recently issued a set of decisions obliging government agencies to use digital payment systems, starting from 1 May. The government agencies will start providing points of acceptance at their headquarters starting from 1 June.
Last October, the National Payments Council has approved a law regulating the use of non-cash payments. This law will present incentives to encourage citizens to use these cards and mobile wallets, especially in government transactions. It will also make the government use digital payment system.
Nasr highlighted the CBE’s efforts in amending the Law No. 88 of 2003 which authorises the CBE to formulate and implement monetary policy. The bank added a new chapter on payments. It would place all payments providers under the regulatory umbrella of the CBE. In addition, there will be a set of laws to provide solutions for fintech and digital financial services.
For mobile money, Nasr said the CBE has a set rules that were passed in 2016, to make it easier for KYC litter (know your client), and faster to have a mobile wallet account in post office or mobile stores. We have currently 12m mobile wallets in the market, and we need just to work on how to attract more people to use it.
There is an additional step related to customer service to be launched this year. It is an application which people will use to create their mobile wallets without the need to go to any mobile store or post office.
“At the same time, we are working on a training programme in digital security. We have a cooperation deal with the Egyptian Banking Institute (EBI) to train 200 employees in digital security during the next two years,” he added.
The CBE works with the Ministry of Finance on a large plan to establish a large network of points of acceptance in the government agencies, in parallel with a training plan for state employees so that they can use these points effectively.
