Tanzania’s payment industry is flourishing making the need for industry partners to work together to be inevitable. There are a number of potential benefits offered by interoperability of financial services including ease of payment, fast, cost effective and secure means of payments. The Bank of Tanzania as a regulator is a stakeholder in this aspect. The Bank of Tanzania in this regard gives advice and setting policies to ensure smooth, safe and secure operations among parties involved. To date, various Payment Systems Provides maintain bilateral agreements in order to facilitate payments for their customer wishing to make transfer of funds from one payment system provider to another.
The Bank of Tanzania is currently implementing a project to build an interoperable payment system known as Tanzania Instant Payments System (TIPS) expected to go live in June 2020. TIPS is an interoperable digital payment platform to be operated by the Bank of Tanzania, which allows the transfer of payments between different Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs), both banks and non-banks such as e-money issuers. TIPS will handle real-time payments exchanged among participating Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs). TIPS will increase financial inclusion by improving access and usage of financial services in Tanzania through promoting the interoperability of digital financial services amongst all Payment Service Providers in the country. The TIPS platform facilitates an efficient clearing and settlement platform of digital financial services transactions for all Payment Service Providers (PSPs). It will also increase the efficiency by moving from bilateral interoperability to multilateral interoperability.
With the changing demands in technology and financial industry, the need of having reliable and secure payment system is a priority in most Central Banks. The Directorate of National Payments Systems is in the continuous process of enhancing the current Real time Gross Settlement System to ensure secure, reliable and faster processing of payments. In this TISS Modernization project, the current TISS will be enhanced to cope with the changing needs in the industry.
Bank of Tanzania is undertaking a project to establish a Financial Services Registry (FSR) which will be mapping financial services access points and type of services they provide across the country. FSR will provide a sustainable mechanism of capturing GPS location of all publicly accessible financial services outlets and their services. FSR has been designed to support regulators to develop policies and monitor improvements on national financial inclusion goals. Further, it will support Financial Service Providers to identify and target potentially underserved markets with financial services.
Depending on access rights provided data will be available to the Public, Financial Service Providers and Regulators through a designated website.
The following services and outlets will be captured within the Financial Services Registry:
