The President Lasbela Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Ismail Suttar has said that there seems no reason why the banks take a day off on the first of Ramadan every year on the pretext of deducting Zakat from the savings account. He demanded of the State Bank of Pakistan to remain open on 1st of Ramadan, instead of closing down all the bank branches causing massive financial losses to the economy.
This holiday was justifiable in days when there used to be ledgers and registers with manual entries and staff at the banks used to sit late hours on 'chand raats' to calculate Zakat on saving accounts with calculators in hand with tremendous concentration where the clerks used to do the initial calculations whereas the senior management used to verify those entries and calculations. Yes that was the time when a holiday was justified after a tedious day of very hard labor by the banking staff.
Today much more calculation is done at each and every branch with a click of a button on a daily basis calculation of billions of interest of various clients plus at the same time managing hundreds of products under different brands paying different percentage of interest. Do the banks really need a day off for calculating simple amounts?
With the development of the software and ERP's for the banking industry where complex calculations have been delegated to the systems and software's the banking industry should do away with this holiday in the name of Zakat deduction if not from this year as it is just a day or two ahead the state bank should take a note of this and immediately order suspension of this holiday from the next year positively. Looking at the brighter side it is a norm in the banking industry that they are good at calculating so why take a day off for such a small calculation that too when the computers are doing it for you the heads of all the private banks working in Pakistan should approach the state bank and request for the suspension of this unnecessary holiday so that the clients do not suffer. Pakistan today needs fewer holidays and more work days, he maintained.