By Albertus Mutonga Matongela
This is the 4th article in a series of articles on payment systems in Namibia. The present article provides you with other stakeholders in the National Payment System. Happy reading.
THERE are other stakeholders involved in the National Payment System (NPS) in Namibia, worth mentioning. It is important to mention that these participants are not involved in the clearing and settlement process. Their involvement in the National Payment System is limited to the consumption of payment services, provision of goods and services to consumers and providing specialised services to the payment community.
Consumers
Consumers of payment services include individuals, corporations, firms and government institutions. They are participants in the NPS because they use cash, paper, card or electronic fund transfer, at point of sale terminals or remotely, to pay and get their goods and services in Namibia.
Merchants
There are various merchants in Namibia of Namibian and South African origin active in the National Payment System. Merchants such as Shoprite, Checkers, Woermann Brock and Company, and several other merchants in Namibia accept certain, if not all, payment instruments from consumers, who need to pay and acquire products in order to satisfy their daily needs and wants.
SWIFT
The Society for World-wide Inter-bank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) based in Brussels, Belgium, with processing centres in various countries, provides a shared worldwide data processing and communications link and a common language for international financial transaction messages. It connects Real Time Gross Settlement Systems (RTGS) of central banks, security systems and systems of payment systems participants for the transmission of financial information in a speedy, reliable, secure and standardised manner. The SWIFT infrastructure is active in Namibia mainly for high value financial messages and plans are in place to handle small value payment messages as well. As of 2006, about 7?