With this upgrade, Bank of Botswana can now enhance its operational effectiveness, foster innovation, and better serve the needs of the nation’s economy and its financial systems.

PROJECT SPOTLIGHT /Montran/ — Bank of Botswana, the central bank of Botswana, went live with Montran’s RTGS upgrade solution. With a partnership that began in the year 2006 with implementation of Montran’s RTGS solution, the first upgrade was provided in the year 2015, followed by this successful upgrade to the ISO20022 messaging standard.The RTGS upgrade brings in the following features and benefits to the central bank and its participants:

• ISO20022 messaging standard: Usage of the new messaging standard results in data enrichment for faster payment processing, greater operational efficiency, better risk management, increased interoperability and flexibility.
• Y-copy Topology: Y-copy topology enhances data reliability and system resilience with each processed payment instruction sent to two destinations simultaneously. While the primary system handles live transactions, the secondary system receives the same data for auditing, reconciliation, or disaster recovery purposes without interrupting the primary operation.
• 24x7x365 processing capability: Provision of processing payments round-the-clock in the RTGS application.
• Liquidity management: Improved and enhanced liquidity management features allow participants to better manage their liquidity and ensure that they have necessary funds for the business, while also optimizing payment processing efficiency.
• Multi-currency and multi-language support: The new upgraded solution supports multiple currencies along with multi-language support.
• Manual & Automatic execution of business events: The Central bank can execute the timetable event manually or set pre-defined times based on which events are automatically executed.
• Financial and non-financial message support: The solution supports and processes all financial and non-financial transactions.
• Enhanced Integration capabilities: The new upgraded solution facilitates integration with the bank’s internal and external systems to send and receive payments.

On successful implementation of the RTGS solution, the application onboarded nine commercial banks and five external stakeholders in the system. The system went live with the latest ISO20022 message format specifications, i.e., IAP v 1.2 (ISO Accelerator Pack for RTGS). Various operational and business processes that were executed manually in the earlier version of the application are now automated. For instance, funding/ defunding from/ to the settlement account to the reserve account, automated processing for SDF (Standing Deposit Facility) – from initiation and interest calculation to interest credit to participants, automated SLF (Standing Lending Facility) processing, central bank and government-related accounts management, enablement of settlement instructions in the PO (Payment Originator) system for commercial bank funds transfer, in instances where the SWIFT network is unavailable.

With this upgrade, Bank of Botswana can now enhance its operational effectiveness, foster innovation, and better serve the needs of the nation’s economy and its financial systems.