Pakistan Real-time Interbank Settlement Mechanism (PRISM-RTGS) system started its operations in July 2008. Since its inception the transaction volumes including 3rd party fund transfers have significantly increased.
2. At present Core Banking and PRISM systems at participants’ end are not integrated, hence the participants manually enter payment instructions in the PRISM system, which is inefficient and prone to errors. Therefore, in order to improve efficiency and minimize errors in payment processing, it has been decided under Section 3 of Payment Systems and Electronic Fund Transfer (PS&EFT) Act 2007 that the participants shall implement STP by December 31, 2016 for automated processing of transactions through PRISM system by integrating it with their banking systems.
3. For STP implementation project, the PRISM participants shall ensure the following:
i. Appropriate security controls at Systems, Database, Application, Network, and Procedural levels are deployed.
ii. Re-Engineering of processes wherever required especially with regard to Data Management, Reconciliation and Exception Handling.
iii. Rigorous Testing and Quality Assurance during the project.
iv. Audit and Security Assessment (preferably independent) should certify the implementation of requisite controls, testing results and process design before ‘Going Live’.
v. Proper arrangements for Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) schemes are in place.
vi. All costs of STP implementation shall be borne by the participants; as SBP will only be responsible to provide required technical guidance.
vii. Responsibility for any loss/damage to itself or to any other participant or customer because of any fault, error, malfunctioning of STP implementation shall rest with the participant.
viii. Adherence to all relevant laws, rules, regulations and instructions issued from time to time.
All PRISM participants are advised to submit STP Implementation Plan by 15th February 2016 to Payment Systems Department covering the timelines for the project. Further, to facilitate the implementation of STP, SBP has also developed the technical guidelines which may be obtained by participants’ authorized officials from the following address.