In mid-January the Board of Directors of the Central Bank (BCU) instructed Urutec (administrator of the Automated Clearing House) “to carry out all the necessary steps” to implement before June 1, 2023 the operation of the “online transfers” 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, according to a resolution of the Board of Directors.
The BCU considers that this type of transfers between different institutions “they must also function normally during the days and hours in which the computer systems of the institutions involved are offline”, accompanied by “high security standards”. In addition, it is understood that it would be “a substantial advance for the increase in the use of safer and more efficient electronic means.”
The latest official data revealed that there were six banks that offered the service in real time: Banco República (BROU), Itaú, HSBC, Citi, BBVA and Santander. The operation works during business days from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Instant Transfer allows a person to instruct their financial institution online to send a specified amount of money to an account at another institution in real time. In other words, the money is debited from the source account and credited to the destination account in a matter of seconds, once it is processed and confirmed by the receiving bank.
with cell phone number
Today approximately 100 million annual transfers are made between accounts of the same institution and 30 million transfers between accounts of different banks per year. Among the latter, only 2.5% are instantaneous (The rest can take hours and even days if it is a holiday or weekend).
The general manager of Urutec, Carlos Ham, pointed out weeks ago that two things are needed to increase this percentage: unlimited availability of days or hours (24/7, which would be available at the end of the semester) and improve user experience. For that, they work on what is known as “Alias”, as he explained to El País weeks ago.
“In Uruguay, what was chosen as Alias and what we are going to work to develop is that it be the cell phone number. That is, when you need someone to transfer money to you, if he has you in his contact list with his cell phone, he will transfer or you can tell him to transfer me and you will pass him your cell number. The person will not need to remember the account number, ”she exemplified.
Urutec It is owned by the Electronic Stock Exchange of Uruguay (Bevsa) which has as shareholders all the banks that operate in Uruguay. Since 2015, the Automated Clearing House (CCA) has been operating.
fast payments
In this sense, one of the objectives is to have a fast online payment system that competes with cards. In this way, it seeks to promote instant money transfers between people, but also between people and businesses, so that it can be used as another means of payment along with cash, cards and checks in daily operations.
“What we promote is more competition, not just competition within each ecosystem, but more ecosystems. That is to say, that in addition to checks and cards that may have costs, generate another system that competes and that allows, since the system is more efficient, to lower costs in the long run,” the president of the BCU, Diego, had said on the occasion. Labat at a press conference.
