Payments today are not your father's payments of yesteryear. Gone are the days of the quaint cheque and in are twenty-first century demands for real-time payment processing from banks and corporates.
Without a payment system, economic integration is going nowhere, said Ronald Waas, director for the directorate of accounting and payment systems at Bank Indonesia, as he addressed the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications Swift business forum in Jakarta last month. While he spoke about the on-going initiative to forge closer economic ties between the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, his comments rang true within Indonesia.
The country's existing real-time gross settlement system, BI-RTGS, was launched in...
