All support for establishment of “e-commerce/e-payment gateway in Pakistan. Anusha

ISLAMABAD ( BMZ REPORT )

The Minister of State for IT Mrs. Anusha Rahman said that “e-commerce” being a major component of economic development is considered as a vital element of national economic policies throughout the globe. Therefore, it is indispensible for Pakistan to have a complete functional e-commerce gateway to act as a bridge between the merchant’s website & financial institutions for legitimate processing of e-transactions, and Ministry of IT as an enabler will continue its support for establishment of “e-commerce/e-payment gateway in Pakistan. She stated this while chairing 3rd Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) meeting for establishment of e-payment gateway in Pakistan which held here today in MoIT. The meeting was attended by Chairman PTA Syed Ismail Shah, Member Telecom Mr. Mudassar Hussain, Member HR/IT Mr. Tahir Mushtaq, Member Legal Ms. Ameena Sohail and senior officials from Ministry of Finance, Minister of Commerce, PSEB, State Bank of Pakistan, FBR & MoIT.
Anusha Rehman, said that for successful establishment of e-commerce gateway, its mandatory to have a “comprehensive e-commerce policy framework” which will have policy guidelines, rules & regulations alongwith dispute resolution and remedial mechanism for consumers etc. This will ensure the security of the system and will also work as trust building measure. The nominees of Ministry of Commerce were requested to expedite the process and all stakeholders to fully provide all facilitation in this regard.

Anusha Rahman, stressed all IMC members/stakeholders to adopt an holistic approach to enable fully functional e-commerce value chain in Pakistan so that the citizens of Pakistan could get benefits from the potential of e-commerce being extensively used across the globe. She said that after the Payment System Operators (PSO) & Payment System Providers (PSP)’s have been announced by SBP, now Ministry of Commerce should solicit mechanism to coordinate with International e-Commerce players such as Paypal, Ali Baba etc encouraging them to establish their setup to enable e-commerce services in Pakistan.

Representatives of SBP apprised the Minister that SBP is already complying with the directions of IMC and has issued 04 licenses to major banks for branchless e-banking and they are successfully carrying out their operations throughout the country and SBP is continuously processing such more applications received from other banks as well for domestic transactions.

Anusha Rahman further said that our export based remittances as reported by SBP are not representing the actual figures because all IT companies are not getting their transactions/remittances under six digit head allocated by SBP. She requested SBP to issue an “advisory” to all concerned in this regard so that actual figures could be reflected (which is calculated to be more than 4 times higher than reported).