Thursday, 28 March 2024
Lanka Clear becomes the 1st in South Asia to launch CITS

Lanka Clear becomes the 1st in South Asia to launch CITS

LankaClear has become the 1st in South Asia to launch online transfers for the Cheque Imaging and Truncation System( CITS).

Sri Lanka was also the 1st country in South Asia to successfully roll out a sophisticated system like CITS way back in 2006..

The operator of Sri Lanka’s National Payment Network, LankaPay, made yet another stride in the payment and settlement arena by completely automating the cheque clearing cycle by introducing the online transfer mode of the Cheque Imaging and Truncation System (CITS), company official said.

Sri Lanka is the 1st country in South Asia to launch the Online Transfer Mode of CITS, which replaced the current inefficient practice of transferring the last mile of cheque images through CD-ROMs.

CITS will bring down human intervention and inefficiencies associated with the current cheque clearing process to a bare minimum, thus allowing the banks to further improve their customer.

With Central Bank supervision, LankaClear launched the Cheque Imaging and Truncation System (CITS) in 2006.

This transformed the domestic interbank cheque clearing process by eliminating the cumbersome physical presentation of the cheque, which saved time and brought down processing costs substantially.

CITS initially eliminated inefficiencies associated with the physical presentation of cheques in 2006, but the banks still had to submit the MICR data of physical cheques saved onto CD-ROMs and delivered to LankaClear on daily basis..

The new Online Transfer Mode of CITS gives the banks the ability to transmit the MICR data of physical cheques through a direct online transfer mode to LankaClear via a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) with end-to-end encryption.

New CITS went live on 18 October 2016 with the participation of several member banks including Hatton National Bank,Commercial Bank, Cargills Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and NDB.

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