Post Office to introduce electronic money transfer system

Mahmuda Shaolin

The Bangladesh Post Office (BPO) is going to introduce Electronic Money Transfer System (EMTS) for speedy delivery of remittances across the country very soon, a top official said.

"We'll start the service by the end of January," Mobassher ur Rahman, director general of the BPO told the FE.

Initially, the service will be provided through 70 head post offices and 550 upzilla post offices and it will be extended to 8,000 rural post offices soon, he said.

Currently, the state-owned postal department is transferring money manually, which generally takes one to five days to reach its destinations, depending on the charge paid for the service.

But time has changed and customers of BPO have demanded urgent money transfer to compete with the private money transfer companies, he stated.

To meet the customers demand, General Post Office (GPO) started a process of developing a software for electronic money transfer to ease money delivery and receipts all over the country, the BPO chief said.

"The EMTS will ease the processing time. It will replace the age-old manual system, which is costly and time-consuming," he added.

The BPO chief said the latest move is part of a series of reforms his department has undertaken to make full utilisation of post offices across the country.

"Out of our 10,000 offices, only about 1000 offices, situated in the cities and towns, are fully used. The remaining offices remain underutilised throughout the year," he said.

"We want to change the way the post offices operate in the country. We want to make our postmen fast, hard working and efficient," he added.

There is a strong demand for urgent money transfer now. Dhaka and Chittagong have millions of workers coming from remote corners of the country and they need to send their money to their families.

But the BPO might face a problem of maintaining required amount of cash in all 10,000 post offices across the country once the EMTS is introduced, the DG informed.

"But we can solve the problem by offering the rural post masters cash incentives if they pay the recipients from their own sources," Mr. Mobassher affirmed.

Through a rural post office a customer can transfer a minimum of Tk 100 and a maximum of Tk 10,000 within a few minutes, and a customer will have to pay bellow Tk 20 as service charge for sending Tk 1000 against the existing charge of Tk 23, he said.

Rural postmasters will also get some incentives for providing service to the customers.

Apart from the decision, the BPO has started delivering money transferred by global money transfer company Western Union through 450 post offices.

The BPO also signed a remittance delivery agreement with two international banks, Standard Chartered and Citi N.A, and several private commercial banks (PCBs) for delivering remittances across the country.

The BPO, one of the country's oldest department with over 40,000 employees, incur losses of around Tk 1.25 billion a year.