KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has completed digitisation of the regulatory approval system for foreign exchange cases aiming to support ease of doing business.

“The SBP initiated the project of ‘End-to-End Digitalisation of FX Cases’ with an objective to enhance ease of doing business by providing a fully digitalised platform to business community and individuals approaching banks for their foreign exchange related requests to SBP,” said the central bank on Monday. The project was divided into two phases.

In the first phase, banks were linked with ‘SBP FX Regulatory Approval System (RAS)’ on March 24, 2020; which enabled banks to submit FX related cases electronically for regulatory approval of SBP and SBP-Banking Services Corporation (BSC).

The system has embedded features of providing transparent case tracking mechanisms through emails to customers and case status information option on SBP website.

“This initiative significantly enhanced operational efficiency and resulted in cost reduction, improved transparency and led to faster decision making at SBP and banks,” it added.

“Since the launch of the system, a total of 59,176 forex cases have been submitted digitally by the banks —instead of paper-based submission — through RAS till July 31, 2021,” it added.

In the second phase of the project, the SBP further extended the facilitation to the business community, whereby the banks developed portals to digitally receive foreign exchange cases from their clients for processing. The project was launched by SBP Governor Dr Reza Baqir on Oct 16, 2020, wherein SBP FX RAS and FX portals of eight banks were showcased to the business fraternity.

The project was successfully completed on June 30, 2021 when 27 banks, constituting 99.6 per cent of the industry’s FX business, launched their portals for digital submission of FX cases by their clients.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2021