A team from the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) has vis­it­ed T&T to con­tin­ue dis­cus­sions on this coun­try’s adop­tion of a fast pay­ments so­lu­tion along the lines of In­dia’s Uni­fied Pay­ments In­ter­face (UPI).

A post on Cen­tral Bank’s web­site said the vis­it took place over April 7 to 11, 2025 dur­ing which ex­pe­ri­ences from In­dia, Brazil, Sri Lan­ka, Thai­land, Pe­ru and The Mal­dives were among those re­viewed.

The bank ex­plained this on­site mis­sion formed part of on­go­ing tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance from the IMF fo­cused on T&T’s mod­erni­sa­tion of its pay­ments sys­tem.

It added that a sum­ma­ry of the tech­ni­cal as­sis­tance re­port would be pub­lished once com­plet­ed.

The IMF mis­sion team com­prised An­ca Padu­raru and Man­isha Pa­tel.

Par­tic­i­pants in­clud­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, iGovTT, T&T In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre, In­foLink Ser­vices Ltd, com­mer­cial banks and var­i­ous de­part­ments of the Cen­tral Bank.

On­line pre­sen­ta­tions were made by the cen­tral banks of Sri Lan­ka, Thai­land and the mon­e­tary au­thor­i­ty of the Mal­dives on the re­spec­tive jour­neys of their coun­try in adopt­ing easy, in­stant and safe pay­ments so­lu­tions for their pop­u­la­tions, the Cen­tral Bank stat­ed.

A “fast pay­ments” arrange­ment, along the lines of In­dia’s UPI is ex­pect­ed to be in­tro­duced in T&T this year.

A re­lease is­sued by the Cen­tral Bank in No­vem­ber 2024 said T&T cur­rent­ly has a wide range of op­tions for pay­ments for goods and ser­vices: among oth­er things, in­di­vid­u­als typ­i­cal­ly use cash, checks, on­line in­ter­net trans­fers, deb­it and cred­it cards, while fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions and oth­er busi­ness­es al­so utilise so-called ACH (au­to­mat­ic clear­ing house) and RT­GS (re­al-time gross set­tle­ments) arrange­ments to move funds.

It said what was miss­ing was a na­tion­wide fast pay­ments sys­tem al­low­ing for easy, se­cure and al­most in­stan­ta­neous trans­fer of funds us­ing cell­phones along the lines of In­dia’s UPI, or for that mat­ter equiv­a­lent arrange­ments in many oth­er coun­tries like Brazil, Kenya and Chi­na.

Hence, the col­lab­o­ra­tion with In­dia.

“The idea is to take ac­count of In­dia’s learn­ings from its ex­pe­ri­ence, while tai­lor­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion to our spe­cif­ic coun­try cir­cum­stances. At the same time con­sul­ta­tions are be­ing held with oth­er coun­tries and in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies (In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank, Cor­po­ración An­d­i­na de Fo­men­to etc) to dis­til best prac­tices around the world,” the bank had said.

A ‘pi­lot’ is be­ing sched­uled for the first half of 2025 to test the sys­tem in T&T and work out de­tails.

By the end of 2025, the sys­tem is ex­pect­ed to be ful­ly func­tion­ing.

“When ful­ly op­er­a­tional, us­ing the UPI-based sys­tem in Trinidad and To­ba­go will be very sim­ple. Say for ex­am­ple, you wish to buy four dou­bles: you need to have a work­ing cell­phone, the UPI app down­loaded on your phone, and mon­ey in your ac­count that will be used; once the dou­bles ven­dor is al­so signed up to UPI, you sim­ply trans­fer the mon­ey to his/her ac­count,” the Cen­tral Bank fur­ther ex­plained.