E-Payment

Go for E-Payment

By: Teckhuat

I would like to suggest that Malaysian Government seriously looks at implementing e-Payment facilities at all government agencies.

I have been various countries where transactions and payments at government departments can be done electronically via ATM cards and debit cards.

Among the benefits of encouraging both the government departments and the public to use e-Payment are:

It is Safer

People need not carry so much cash with them, especially in view of the number of snatch thefts happening these days.

If the ATM or debit card is lost, you only have to report it to bank, which will issue you a new one for a small fee.

If you are the cautious type, you will never reveal your PIN to anyone and all you will end up losing is the money you pay as the replacement fee for the lost card.

Less Paper Work

For the counter staff who handle payments, they will have less reconciliation work to do at the end of the day to balance the cash they have collected with that in the e-payment system.

Manual counting of cash and doing the balancing at the end of day is a tedious process and counter staff sometimes end up making up the difference if they come up short!

Faster Processing

If every transaction is cashless, the entire process will be faster as a counter staff does not have to count and recount the money handed to him to ensure it is correct.

Also, there is often a limit to how much cash a counter staff can hold and if this is exceeded, the staff would have to close his or her counter to transfer the cash. This would mean that a client would take longer to be "processed" as there would be fewer counters open.

Automated Kiosks

If e-Payment is implemented, automated kiosks can be set up to handle simple transactions, thus freeing up counter staff to handle complaints or attend to customer service, for example.

One good example of this: the kiosks set up for passport renewals.

Source: BlogSpace, Sunday Star, July 26, 2009
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