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Tuesday, 17 February 2015

UMOJA SWITCH NETWORK GOES REGIONAL



Dar es Salaam.
Tanzanians, banking with commercial banks that subscribe to Umoja Switch, will now be able to withdraw cash from Automated Teller Machines (ATM's) across Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda without incurring extra charges, it was revealed last week.

This has been made possible after the integration of the switches across the four countries in order to facilitate card-based payments across East Africa, the Umoja Switch chief executive Officer (CEO) said.

Mr. Danford Mbilinyi told The Citizen in the city that the five payments switches; Umoja Switch of Tanzania, Kenya’s KenSwitch and Pay net, Inter-switch of Uganda and Rwanda’s R- Switch have integrated to create a single platform.

The integration will become operational on March 1, 2015.

It will enhance the expansion in economic activities because it seeks to lower transactions costs to customers and the country at large.

“With a shared payment network within the region, the customer will no longer need to have several cards when undertaking service payments. The holder of a CRDB ATM card for instance, can withdraw money from a bank from any member country,” he elaborated. He said the enlargement of the financial services could also lead to the expansion of other sectors because if financial sector is strong, its impact in term of economies of scale will have something to do with the other sectors.

According to him, the integration will also promote the security among the customers within the region adding that the member states will be more freely in running their businesses

“This will help the people to have discipline when it comes to the point of the use of money due the reason that walking with no hard cash reduces the chance to use money extravagantly,” Mr. Mbilinyi noted.

Mr. Mbilinyi also said the integration will enhance flexibility of the use of money following the fact that the customers will no longer be necessarily needed to walk with hard cash, therefore he added, they make expenditures whenever they.

The Citizen

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