ISLAMABAD, Nov 23 (APP): Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecommunications, Mrs Anusha Rahman on Monday said it is indispensable for Pakistan to have a complete functional e-commerce gateway to act as a bridge between merchant’s website and financial institutions for legitimate processing of e-
transactions.
Ministry of IT, as an enabler will continue its support for establishment of e-commerce and e-payment gateway in Pakistan, she said this while chairing a meeting of Inter-Ministerial
Committee (IMC) for establishment of e-payment gateway in Pakistan.
The meeting was attended by Chairman Pakistan
Telecommunication Authority (PTA), Dr Syed Ismail Shah, Member
Telecom, Mudassar Hussain, Member HR/IT, Tahir Mushtaq, Member Legal
Ms. Ameena Sohail and senior officials from Ministry of Finance,
Minister of Commerce, Pakistan Software Export board (PSEB), State
Bank of Pakistan, Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR).
The Minister said e-commerce, being a major component of
economic development is considered as a vital element of national
economic policies throughout the globe.
She emphasized that for successful establishment of
e-commerce gateway, it is mandatory to have a comprehensive
e-commerce policy framework which will have policy guidelines, rules
and regulations alongwith dispute resolution and remedial mechanism
for consumers.
This, she said, would ensure security of the system and
also work as trust building measure.
The nominees of Ministry of Commerce were requested to
expedite the process and all stakeholders to fully provide all
facilitation in this regard.
Anusha Rahman stressed all IMC members/stakeholders to
adopt an holistic approach to enable fully functional e-commerce
value chain in Pakistan so that citizens could get benefits from
potential of e-commerce being extensively used across the globe.
She said after Payment System Operators (PSO) & Payment System
Providers (PSP) have been announced by SBP, now Ministry of Commerce
should solicit mechanism to coordinate with International e-Commerce
players such as Paypal, Ali Baba etc, encouraging them to establish
their setup to enable e-commerce services in Pakistan.
The representatives of SBP apprised the Minister that SBP was
already complying with directions of IMC and has issued 04
licenses to major banks for branchless e-banking and they
were successfully carrying out their operations throughout the
country,
The SBP is continuously processing such more applications
received from other banks as well for domestic transactions.
Anusha Rahman said our export based remittances as reported
by SBP are not representing actual figures because all IT companies
are not getting their transactions/remittances under six digit head
allocated by SBP.
She asked SBP to issue an “advisory” to all concerned in
this regard so that actual figures could be reflected (which is
calculated to be more than 4 times higher than reported).
Pakistan's National News Agency
