The Chief Executive of the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement System (GhIPSS), Archie Hesse has urged trainee teachers, nurses and students in general, to cultivate the habit of using their e-zwich cards to make payments.
Speaking in an interview, Mr Hesse said the use of the cards to make payments was a more efficient way than just using it to withdraw funds and then make payments with cash.
The number of e-zwich cardholders continue to rise as government turns to the electronic payment system for disbursement of funds for many of its social interventions.
The latest additions being the trainee nurses and teachers’ allowances. While commending government for the bold initiative, Mr. Hesse is of the view that government’s extensive use of the e-zwich system should dovetail into the larger cashless agenda by encouraging the holders of the biometric card to use it to pay for goods and services.
He, therefore, wanted the Central Bank, and financial institutions to team up with GhIPSS to create more avenues where e-zwich cardholders can use their cards to make payments.
He suggested that key stakeholders should find ways of making more Point of Sales (POS) devices available at cheaper cost to merchants so that they can deploy many more particularly at locations where these students shop.
The use of e-zwich to pay allowances, salaries and other forms of emoluments christened e-zwich Payment Distribution System, (PDS) saw a 94 percent jump in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year.
The total volume of the transactions went up from over 700,000 to over 1.3 million, according to the half-year performance report of GhIPSS.
The report also indicates that the value of transactions over the same period was up by almost 53 percent from 283.8 million cedis to 433.4 million cedis.
The significant rise shows that more people are paid through e-zwich than previously.
“With the addition of trainee nurses, teachers and the first-year university students, the volume and value of transactions will go up further, and so we have to seize the opportunity to make these first-time users opt to use the cards to make payments,” Mr. Hesse stressed.
He said the intervention of the Central Bank and government to make the POSes cheaper, would be timely and in line with the current cashless, paperless and technology enabled services that government was championing.
GNA