The Central Bank of Iran’s Innovative Technologies Department has performed well in developing infrastructures to improve the transparency of banking transactions, the department said.
In a press release posted on CBI’s website, the bank said its Innovative Technologies Department is working on 50 technological projects for this purpose.
It said the regulator of payment network, a CBI affiliate known locally as Shaparak, has cracked down on more than 2.5 million payment devices whose users lacked valid identification documents.
The crackdown was in line with efforts to curb tax evasion and suspicious transactions through unidentified payment instruments.
In addition, Shaparak has sent the data about users of 4.8 million payment instruments to the Iranian National Tax Administration.
Since the beginning of January, the payment regulator has obliged new applicants of payment instruments, including internet gateways and POS terminals, to open tax return files at INTA.
The proposal to tax POS transactions became law two years ago but went through adjustments due to technical issues. The law was passed to curb tax evasion and fraud, particularly in the high income brackets like lawyers, physicians and realtors, many of them infamous for evading tax.
For promoting transparency in check payments, the CBI’s innovation department rolled out electronic platforms to enforce the new check law in late March.
To enforce the new check law, CBI has designed an integrated electronic system and streamlined electronic check-processing platforms, namely “Sayyad” and “Chekavak”.
Sayyad is a system designed to run a credibility check on account holders wanting to write a check. Chekavak is an electronic check processing system for eliminating the physical circulation of checks and improving the reliability of checks.
Check issuers are required to register data such as date of issuance, sum and identity of the beneficiary on the Sayyad platform.
CBI has launched a project known as NAHAB to ascertain the identity of bank clients and stop processing banking transactions of customers whose identity is not clear for the bank.
NAHAB generates a unique code for Iranians, entities and foreigners residing in the country. The special code will be used to ease the identification of bank customers.
As per the new measure, PAYA and SATNA networks will stop processing transactions lacking the full ID of bank customers. PAYA is the electronic clearing house and SATNA is CBI’s Real Time Gross Settlement platform.
The CBI’s Innovative Technologies Department said the NAHAB project is evolving and when it is complete, the ID requirements will be demanded by other CBI platforms. The measure has helped minimize unidentified bank accounts.
The department said the number of such accounts are meager and “constitute less than 0.1% of the total bank accounts”.
