KARACHI, July 25: The State Bank of Pakistan has reduced the time limit to half of the previously available time for exchange companies to provide data regarding the foreign exchange transactions.The SBP on Friday issued a circular asking all exchange companies to provide their data in five days instead of 10 days and this would be applicable from July.

The exchange companies are required to submit monthly data of foreign exchange transactions to the Statistics and Data Warehouse Department (Formerly Statistics Department) by the 10th of the following month.

“Keeping in view, considerable developments in IT field and need to increase the efficiency of statistical information system to provide timely aggregate foreign exchange data, it has become imperative to reduce the period of submission for the captioned data from 10 days to 5 days,” said the SBP circular.

The SBP said it would help to provide reliable and timely data for decision making at various levels in different organisations, central bank and the government.

In order to make necessary arrangements for reporting foreign exchange data on revised schedule, exchange companies were advised to report data for the July 2008 onward by 5th of the following month to the reference month along-with the basic documents of the transactions.