Multinational - Technical Assistance for the Harmonisation of the Existing Payments System Infrastructure Across Ecowas

This intervention concerns the Technical support for harmonisation of existing payments system infrastructure across ECOWAS. The project aims to support technical assistance in: 1) Developing detailed functional and technical specifications; and business rules and procedures (regional instant payment system and RTGS based on scoping work done under World Bank TA, and initial ECOWAS report); 2) Facilitating project governance setup (including linkage to ECOWAS working committees); 3) Facilitating and coordinating the framework for the public/private partnerships engagements on the project; 4) Developing a comprehensive action plan for the execution of the project and supporting the bid evaluation processes for vendor solutions and 5) Recruiting a Project Manager or Consultant to handle coordination of the TA two projects (regional instant retail payments system and RTGS). i.e. World Bank and ADFI explored the options of sharing any staff funded under the TA for efficiency. This work will link to and leverage the technical assistance work that World Bank initiated with ECOWAS. The technical assistance will complement the additional work World Bank executed on outlining the system components by detailing the functions systems design for the regional instant retail payment systems and RTGS as well as strengthening the governance of the project. The expected Outputs: i) Detailed functional designs, business rules and procedures for the two systems; ii) Governance framework established and iii) strategic partnerships framework finalized.