iGA & Benefit in deal to boost ePayment sector

The Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Benefit Company (Benefit) to develop ePayment services and banking processes to improve performance and reduce cost. 

The deal was signed, during a Press Conference held yesterday, by iGA Chief Executive Mohamed Ali AlQaed accompanied with Benefit CEO Abdulwahed Al Janahi and Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) Executive Director of Banking Supervision Khalid Hamad. 

The agreement aims to develop an ePay service mechanism for government services across the various online channels provided by iGA and identify the possibility of conducting more financial transactions and bill payments. 

The move also aims to improve the quality of periodic financial reports by launching Credit Reports Service via the national portal and eKiosks in collaboration with CBB. It will also enable the sharing of reports to determine the value of ePayments across all public entities by including the total completed online payments through all available ePayment channels. 

Speaking at the press conference AlQaed stressed the importance of adopting innovative solutions delivered by national companies to raise the quality and efficiency of government eServices as well as reduce expenses, efforts and time while ensuring the delivery of high-quality. 

The MoU will enable the capability to pay via the BenefitPay service to renew ID cards, as well as link ePayments to government entities via Benefit and include them in iGA’s National Payment Aggregator (NPA). 

“Through this agreement, we aim to launch significant joint projects to cater to both public and private sectors; starting with the Electronically Know Your Customer (eKYC) initiative, in addition to providing credit reports via the national portal (Bahrain.bh) in cooperation with the Central Bank of Bahrain,” said Al Janahi. 

Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) Executive Director of Banking Supervision Khalid Hamad further told DT News, “The central bank several years ago recognised that market is going through significant changes and there is a lot of pressure on the bank to provide better services at a lower cost at the relevant speed and at good quality.”

CBB,  Khalid Hamad said, reacted in a proactive way to certain regulations to facilitate and regulate all of these activities for the use of advanced technologies and financial services. “Furthermore, the database that has been maintained by these two entities are already secure, so if they are communicating with each other there won’t be any security problems as both entities have a massive number of stakeholders and we haven’t heard any cybersecurity problems faced by these two entities,” he added.