Covid-19 Fund: Banks told to ease donation process

In order to facilitate donors, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has advised banks to take further necessary steps for collection of funds under the Prime Minister's COVID-19 Pandemic Relief Fund-2020.

As per the directives, the SBP Monday asked all commercial banks and Microfinance Banks for Pre-configured Account Details of the Fund on digital platforms. Currently, the donors using digital platforms including internet/mobile banking and ATMs have to follow a number of steps including selection of fund's destination bank and population of account details.

In order to reduce the turnaround time for donors in making donations/contributions to the Fund; banks are advised to make "PM COVID-19 Relief Fund" a predefined account/icon enabling the donors to just select the account icon and key-in the amount of donation. This is necessary to ensure donors' convenience in making the donations.

According to the SBP, despite previous directives, as per feedback received from stakeholders, drop box facility for donations to the Fund has not been made fully operational by all banks. Therefore, the banks are advised to ensure that the Drop Box facility is fully operational and prominent notices or banners are placed in all such branches that the donors can drop the crossed cheques in the name of the Fund.

The compliance heads of all the banks shall ensure the same and confirm to SBP within a week that the facility is fully operational and in line with SBP directives.

As the donors can also donate to the Fund by sending an SMS on the Short Code '6677'; the banks acting as a banker to telecom companies will facilitate the Telcos in transmitting the funds so collected to the PM Fund account with NBP on daily basis.

Telcos will advise their respective banks at 3:30 p.m. daily to debit their account with the amount of collections made by the Telco through the short code '6677' during the last working day and transfer the same to the PM Fund. The Telco's bank will accordingly debit the telco's account and send the same to the Fund account with the name of 'Telco-SMS Donations' as the donor.

In order to inform their customers about the "PM COVID-19 Relief Fund" and different mechanisms/channels of making the donation, the banks have been asked to SMS message to all their customers.

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