New payment rules for Common Monetary Area

Payments from and to Namibia with Eswatini, Lesotho and South Africa will as of June take longer to process, be subject to new fees and will not be processed after 14h30 during weekdays.

This forms part of the new rules to take effect, which now require the Common Monetary Area (CMA) payments to be treated as normal forex payments.

The CMA, comprising Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho and South Africa, is set to introduce these changes to how clients make and receive intra-regional payments.

According to a statement issued by FNB Namibia spokesperson Hileni Amadhila, this change was necessitated by new regulations for the treatment of cross-border payments, to which all banks must comply.

FNB and RMB Namibia will switch to the new system effective 11 June, reads the statement.

“With this change, all cross-border electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments processed and received by clients within the CMA will no longer be viewed as domestic payment methods. All cross-border payments to individuals or businesses in the CMA should instead be initiated as a forex transaction/global payment on the FNB App and FNB Online Banking,” said the statement.

According to FNB Namibia payments manager Albert Matongela, when making cross-border payments from FNB Namibia to other CMA countries, clients will need to capture and process payments on the foreign exchange (Forex) tab within the existing online banking platform, or the Forex tab within the FNB App which can be found on the in-app menu.

“Once the change has been effected, clients still trying to use the domestic payment route, will receive an error message when processing a cross-border EFT payment informing them that they cannot proceed with the payment.

“In this instance, clients are advised to delete existing EFT cross-border recipients from their current EFT beneficiary list, including EFT folders and EFT bulk payment files. Clients will need to reload all saved beneficiaries as global payment beneficiaries and input all the necessary information such as name of the bank, name of branch, swift code, payment receiver’s physical address, and reason for the payment,” he said.

Matongela said online banking enterprise (OBE) clients will require channel limits and permissions to be set for individuals capturing and authorising global payments.

He further said global payments can only be made from a transactional account and not a credit card.

“Beneficiaries of cross-border payments will also be required to provide balance of payments information to their bank before the release of the funds into their account,” he said.

Matongela said the changes are in line with modernisation in the financial sector, at national and regional levels.

He said FNB and RMB Namibia have embarked on a full customer education campaign to its customer base to ensure a smooth transition to the new cross-border payment system, aligning Namibia closer to globally accepted banking standards.

– email: bottomline@namibian.com.na