Staff Correspondent
For quick and easy delivery of money across the country, the Bangladesh Post Office (BPO) is going to introduce Electronic Money Transfer System (EMTS) very soon, a high official said.
“We hope to start the service by the end of January,” Mobassher ur Rahman, Director General of the BPO said adding that “Initially, the service will be provided through 70 head post offices and 550 upzilla post offices and it will be extended to 8,000 rural post offices gradually.”
Currently, the postal department is transferring money manually, which generally takes two to five days to reach its destinations, depending on the charge paid for the service.
But time has changed and customers of BPO have demanded urgent money transfer to compete with the private money transfer companies, he added.
To meet the customers demand, General Post Office (GPO) has started a process of developing software for electronic money transfer to ease money delivery and receipts all over the country, Rahman said.
He said the latest move is part of a series of reforms the department has undertaken to make full utilisation of post offices across the country.
“Out of our 10,000 post offices, only 1,000 offices, situated in the cities and towns, are fully used. The remaining offices remain underutilised throughout the year,” he said.
“We want to change the way the post offices operate in the country. We want to make our postmen fast, hard working and efficient,” he added.
There is a strong demand for urgent money transfer now. Dhaka and Chittagong have millions of workers coming from remote areas of the country and they need to send their money to their families, Rahman said.
But the BPO might face a problem of maintaining required amount of cash in all 10,000 post offices across the country. But we can solve the problem by offering the rural post masters cash incentives if they pay the recipients from their own sources,” Mobassher affirmed.
Through the new system a rural post office customer can transfer a minimum of Tk 100 and a maximum of Tk 10,000 within a few minutes, and a customer will have to pay bellow Tk 20 as service charge for sending Tk 1000 against the existing charge of Tk 23, he said.
The BPO also signed a remittance delivery agreement with two international banks, Standard Chartered and Citi Bank NA, and several private commercial banks (PCBs) for delivering remittances across the country.
Courtesy: thebangladeshtoday.com
