BARBADOS – Members of the Barbados banking community were given an insight into Government’s view of e-commerce and how the innovation could be significantly beneficial to Barbados’ future growth and development.
The occasion was a seminar on “Emerging Trends in Check Payment” at Sherbourne Conference Centre, where Minister of Commerce Consumer Affairs and Business Development, Senator Lynette Eastmond, elaborated on the benefits of e-commerce.
“In order to increase Barbados’ sustainable growth rate there is a need for us to export more, and with an economy that is primarily based on services the delivery of digital goods and services becomes more of a reality every day.
“… In other words electronic commerce is a way for us to gain entry to a market that is becoming more open to us everyday. In a sense we merely have to take an opportunity that had been created for us,” the Commerce Minister said.
She was full of praise for Illuminat, the organizers of the seminar, for initiating dialogue which sought to create a viable payment system to facilitate electronic commerce here. She, however, had some recommendations particularly for financial institutions.
“The banks could review their classification parameters for the various types of businesses, since, as an example, digital goods/services could be far less risky than tangible goods. The risk profile of each type of business should therefore be examined since they do not all carry the same level of risk. In many instances this would give customers an opportunity to pay lower charges, the Senator said.
The seminar was aimed at building technological awareness about Check Truncation, a method which has been used in other parts of the world to speed up the processing of personal checks.
Program Director of NCR Payment Solutions, Neil Boyd, gave a presentation of the technology and noted that: bringing it to Barbados is just a matter of interest in the financial community of trying to improve the way they clear everything and speedup that process. Around the Caribbean and the world, other countries are looking at this very seriously now or are already in implementation stages,” he noted.
