Morocco Set to Launch Instant Bank Transfer System in Early 2023

The head of market infrastructure and payment systems oversight at Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM), Adil Zbir, had announced at the end of July, during the USA-Africa Business Summit, the advent of instant bank transfers by the end of the year. "The instant bank transfer system is not yet operational. It is still in testing and requires a lot of technical trials," explains Younes Karkouri, chairman of the executive board of Operations Global Services, a Bank of Africa subsidiary specialized in banking services processing.

The manager specifies that real tests will be carried out on a very limited population in December "in order to ensure that everything will work for the launch at the beginning of next year." This instant bank transfer system will modernize the national clearing system and reduce the time of a transfer or payment from 1 or 2 days currently to just a few seconds. It will also allow banks to offer new banking services to customers.

"Each bank may possibly think about different products that can be based on this instant transfer. For example, this can be imagined with an electronic transaction. Today, when you go to a merchant who takes your card payment, you are debited immediately at the time of purchase, but he will only be credited one or two days later. We can imagine that the merchant is credited on the spot," details a source in the sector, appreciating this technical advance.