IMX Software announced today that it has completed the rollout of a centralized, real-time system to allow the Bank of Zambia to monitor foreign exchange transactions processed by all licensed bureau de change operators across the country.

The vulnerability of the Zambian bureau de change industry to money-laundering has been a concern of central government for a number of years. Attempts to address this risk by imposing daily trading limits on customers have been largely ineffective due to the lack of automation and record-keeping typical in most operators.

In 2016 the Bank of Zambia chose IMX’s GTS-Retail system to provide an automated system to track bureau de change transactions as they occur against a central customer database. This allows the Bank to view the aggregated value of transactions performed by a customer irrespective of where they transacted. IMX has implemented its GTS-Retail hub software in the Bank of Zambia’s head office in Lusaka and has completed the rollout of the GTS-Retail Point-of-Sale software to over 100  bureau de change branches across the country. New features were introduced into the product that allow multiple private operators to trade completely independently from each other with only the BoZ having a global view of activity.

Joseph Munyoro, Assistant Director, Non-Bank Financial Institution Supervision, says: “GTS-Retail is enabling the Bank of Zambia to realise efficiency gains through leveraging the use of technology that has removed the binding constraint we once faced with regard to the number of available on-site examiners.  GTS-Retail has proved to be an efficient means of monitoring and supervising a rapidly growing part of the Zambian financial sector using a limited number of on-site examiners.”

Rob Stansell, Managing Director of IMX in South Africa, says: “Our Zambian implementation team has received a very positive response from the supervisors and tellers during their post-implementation follow-up visits. They managed the change from a paper-based system with limited controls, to a fully automated system with pragmatism and empathy. Bureau staff have expressed their appreciation for the ease-of-use, short transaction times as well as the automated balancing and end-of-day processes.”

The recently announced features in GTS-Retail, which allow for automated scanning and validation of identity documents, will provide bureau de change with the possibility to further strengthen the customer on-boarding process. This will have the added benefit to the bureau operators of automatically populating the customer details without requiring the teller to capture them.