Meeting of the National Payments Council

The National Payments Council (NPC) held its fifteenth meeting at the CBBH in Sarajevo on Wednesday, 24th of October. The meeting was chaired by the Governor of the CBBH and was attended by representatives of the Entity Ministries of Finance, Entity Banking Agencies, selected commercial banks and the CBBH.
The NPC members were generally satisfied with the way in which the new payments system had been operating over the three months since their last meeting. Since its inception, 9,4 million transactions worth KM 13,2 billion have been carried out through the new clearing houses.
The meeting heard reports from the Working Groups that the NPC established at last meeting. The Working Group on the minimum standards that banks need to fulfil to be authorised to perform in the internal payment system reported that there had been agreement reached to reduce the previous three risk categories for payments (low, medium and high) to two categories, intra-bank payments and inter-bank payments. This decision has been accepted by the Entity Banking Agencies and has already been gazetted in the RS and will be gazetted in the Federation shortly. The NPC expressed its support for this outcome.
The Working Group on banks' reporting of payments transactions said agreement has been reached between the commercial banks, the Banking Agencies and the CBBH on a single return that banks would need to complete each month on their payments transactions. The NPC agreed that the new report should start from 1st of January 2002, and that the banks should be asked to submit data on the new basis for the year 2001 as a whole rather than on a monthly basis.
The Working Group on legal issues gave a comprehensive report on the important and complex issues that Group was considering, including initiative to put all regulative regarding payment system into one law.
The meeting discusses the establishment of a single registry of bank accounts. The NPC supports the need for such a registry. They were advised that each entity already had work in train to establish registry of the customers of the banks registered by their Banking Agency. The NPC did not object to Entity registers being established but agreed that for the single registry to achieve its purposes, the information on two registers would have to be shared.
The meeting also expressed dissatisfaction with the limited progress that had been made in simplifying the system of tax payments since the last NPC meeting and again stressed the importance of simplifying the tax payment system, and in particular reducing the number of taxpayers who had to take weekly payments of taxes, such as sales tax, in order to lower the cost of tax collection for small and medium sized businesses.
The CBBH offered to prepare a publication that would bring together all the laws, regulations and decisions that impacted on the payments system, to circulate copies to all interested parties and to update the material when new laws or regulations were adopted. The members of the NPC considered this would be very useful for everyone working in the area.

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