Major Overhaul for Shaparak

EghtesadOnline: The company is set to review its strategies. “Plans have been devised to develop and improve the hardware, software and human resources capabilities of Shapark for revamping it,” Mohsen Qaderi was also quoted as saying by Banker.ir.

News ID: ۷۷۶۶۳۵

30 May 2017

Qaderi made the announcement at a joint meeting of the Office for Innovative Technologies of the Central Bank of Iran and affiliates of the National Informatics Corporation held in Tehran to share views and review CBI policies on the future of Iranian electronic banking.

The official noted that smart management and supervision over the electronic payment network, standardization and upgrading the security and quality of services are among the company’s strategies.

“Shaparak is moving to increase public trust and expand innovative electronic payment services,” Financial Tribune quoted him as saying.

According to Qaderi, projects were implemented during the last Iranian year (ended March 20, 2017) in line with the aforementioned goals.

“Integrating Iran’s payment system with the international networks, implementing the project to secure the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data platform and executing the proposed models for small day-to-day payments were other important measures,” he said.

USSD is a global system for mobile communications technology used to send text between a mobile phone and an application program in the network.

Looking Ahead

Speaking at the same meeting, Ali Kermanshah, CBI’s deputy for innovative technologies, stressed that for major policies to take shape, the country must first look at the past two decades and their challenges, assess the banking system and survey international developments.

“Global trends have caused players in other sectors such as telecommunications and social networks to enter the banking system,” he said, adding that their presence has prompted the system to rethink its strategies.

“One of these developments and new prospects concern the new role of the central bank”, which has raised expectations that it help spur economic growth.

Kermanshah deemed the current potential of National Informatics Corporation positive and referred to it as one of its strengths. However, even though it managed to make headways and has had an acceptable performance, “we need to constantly develop and improve innovative banking services”.

Nasser Hakimi, CBI’s director for information technology, outlined the current challenges facing the banking system, saying a great deal of banking data is being generated, “but they do not turn into generative assets and we cannot use them in our decision-making”.

Therefore, there is a dire need for designing and establishing analytic systems to effectively use these data and incorporate them in making decisions and devising the policies, he added.

“At present, we are facing four challenges, namely information, supervision, policy challenges and those related to patterns of doing business,” he said.

Hakimi noted that solutions have been offered for each of these challenges and companies affiliated with NIC are expected to realize them.