THE local banking industry is expected to invest about RM1.1 billion over the next six years on infrastructure upgrades and deployment of terminals to help accelerate Malaysia’s migration to e-payments.
Bank Negara Malaysia director of payment system policy Tan Nyat Chuan said the successful migration can drive further efficiency gains and cost savings which will improve the country’s competitiveness.
Malaysia is now at the turning point in its migration to e-payments and Bank Negara has been garnering industry support to address among others, accessibility, confidence, awareness, value proposition, pricing and industry incentive structure.
Over the past years, banks have made significant investments to widen the accessibility, enhance the security and introduce new features to augment the value proposition of e-payment services to customers, Tan said.
“In this regard, banking institutions have given their commitment to facilitating and advising customers on safe practices in migrating away from cheques to adopt e-payments.
“However, we have not reached a stage where the masses are familiar or have gained sufficient trust in using Internet banking to conduct their financial transactions,” he said at a briefing, here, yesterday.
Bank Negara has initiated review on payment card and would be issuing reform measures soon, and Tan and others, hinted that it would set a ceiling for the interchange fee to curb rising costs.
To complement the payment card reform framework, the banking industry will deploy 570,000 new point of sales terminals and grow debit card transactions to one billion by 2020, he said.
Bank Negara aims to cut the number of cheque transactions to 100 million a year from about 200 million a year currently.
In a bid to encourage e-payments, Bank Negara had in March last year announced a new pricing strategy for payment services.
The transaction fee for Interbank GIRO conducted via Internet and mobile banking was reduced from RM2 to 10 sen from May 2, last year.