The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and the Controller General of Accounts Pakistan (CGAP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for digitizing federal government payments through Raast.
Raast is Pakistan’s First Instant Payment System, launched in January 2021 by SBP, and now it will be utilized to disburse pensions and salaries to the employees of the Federal Government.
Raast is a flagship initiative of SBP, which provides a simple, fast, low-cost, interoperable and secure electronic payment platform for instant processing of high volume retail payments.
Raast can also simultaneously make payments to multiple beneficiaries to cater to high-volume government payments like salaries, pension, and social security payments.
In the pilot phase, the salaries and pensions of a group of Federal Government employees will be paid through Raast.
The payroll and pension-roll data will be shared from the CGA system to SBP’s Raast through a highly secured interface, and payments to the beneficiaries’ accounts will be made instantly after validating the beneficiaries’ detail.
To ensure that payments are only credited in the intended beneficiary’s account, Raast verifies the beneficiaries’ details with their banks on a real-time basis before crediting the payment in the beneficiary’s account.
After the pilot run, the facility will be rolled out to cover all the salaries, i.e., pension and supplier payments of the Federal and provincial governments.
SBP is also working to utilize the powerful capacities of Raast to include payments of social security nets such as the Ehsaas Program, BISP, and other government entities.
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