State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has digitized the process of banks securing refinance from the central bank under the Islamic and conventional Export Finance Scheme (EFS).
This exercise is part of the regulator’s Vision 2020 initiative to enhance operational efficiency and ease of doing business through digital technology.
“Now EFS-related cases and other relevant data will be submitted electronically to the state bank by banks through an online platform for expeditious regulatory decisions,” the SBP explained, adding: “The implementation of digitization of EFS functions will enable SBP to delegate some of the operations to banks, such as sub-allocation of EFS limits by banks as per their own requirements. Under [the] digitized mechanism, there will be no need of transferring an exporter’s limit from one SBP BSC office to another SBP BSC office. This will ensure swift processing of EFS cases and benefit the banks / exporters availing financing facility under EFS.”
The digital system is expected to reduce turnaround time and optimize resources by eliminating paper-based submissions which create logistic and storage challenges. The newly digitized process will run in parallel with the existing manual submission for a period of four weeks, before a full digital migration.