Liberia - Payments Infrastructure and Systems Upgrade

The proposed project seeks to address the current inefficiencies in two key CBL payment systems, the ACP/ACH and the RTGS, as well as the main and recovery site data centres. The project aims to upgrade the aforementioned systems and infrastructure to acceptable industry standard and facilitate the implementation of a National Electronic Payment Switch. It will primarily impact the CBL and government ministries involved in payments, as well as commercial banks and their customers, all of whom will experience improved services. A secondary but critical outcome of the primary development objective will be increased inclusion and fostering of regional integration through technological upgrade required standards. The project will, in turn, enable the banks and non-banks to build customer confidence and greater reach, by developing additional financial services such as digital loans, savings, insurance, etc. Increased demand for digital financial services, in turn, means there will be demand for other solutions such as ecommerce platforms. It has four main components, namely: (1) the upgrade of the Automated Cheque Processing (ACP) and Automated Clearing House (ACH); (2) the upgrade of the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system; (3) the upgrade of the climate-resilient and energy-efficient Main Data Centre and Disaster Recovery Site; and (4) the project management.