The Commercial International Bank-Egypt (CIB) will activate an agreement with Vodafone-Egypt and Etisalat-Egypt to include them in its Automated Clearing House (ACH) service in the upcoming period, according to a CIB official. According to the source, CIB has conducted 650,000 transactions through the ACH-Debit service within the first six months of 2015, with the number of ACH-Credit transactions reaching about 145,000 during the same period. CIB conducted approximately 1.3m ACH-Debit transactions during 2014, while the total ACH-Credit transactions reached about 80,000 during the same period. The source added that only four ACH-Debit clients are companies that work in the fields of automotives and telecommunications, while there are 96 ACH-Credit clients in total. CIB-Egypt serves ACH-Credit clients operating in 16 fields, including oil, telecommunications, e-marketing, cement, universities, electricity, drilling, and financial brokerage firms. The source explained that the ACH service is based on transfers of financial transactions between banks and clients, whether direct debit transfer or direct deposit. This service has many advantages, the most important of which are fast multiple small-value transactions, as well as the possibility of implementing a series of payment orders in a single file. The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has issued instructions to the Egyptian Banks Co For Technological Advancement (EBC), to create an ACH system. This is based on the electronic transfer of financial transactions at the national level. It provides a new payment system with tool for direct debit and direct deposit, and is based on aggregating and liquidating all financial transfers resulting from electronic transactions in the banking sector. This service includes several parties: a customer/owner of the payment order, the bank that deals with this customer and the ACH operator system; as well as the customer receiving the transfer, its bank, and the transactions processor, which are the companies licensed by the EBC to send payment orders on behalf of the bank through which the payment was processed.
