Nepal Clearing House selects ACI Worldwide to power National Payment Switch service
Nepal Clearing House (NCHL) has partnered with ACI Worldwide and will leverage its enterprise payments platform to power the operation of its upcoming National Payment Switch (NPS) system.
Nepal Clearing House taps ACI Worldwide for NPS
The NPS initiative seeks to deliver a layer of core infrastructure for Nepal that will support interoperability between different card payment systems through its NPS National Card Switch (NPS-NCS) solution. The company will also launch a domestic card scheme called Nepalpay to “help increase acceptance, implement data localisation and reduce transaction charges”.
NCHL, which facilitates the clearing and settlement of financial transactions and operates as a publicly-listed company under the supervision of the country’s central bank, Nepal Rastra Bank, will apply the infrastructure to ensure compatibility between retail card and non-card transactions and end the country’s reliance on international payment gateways.
ACI’s payments platform, which the Florida-based vendor describes as “an end-to-end payments hub solution”, currently powers around one-third of all real-time payment systems globally, including 25 domestic and pan-regional real-time schemes.
With cloud and on-premises applicability, NCHL says it will use the platform to deliver its NPS system in Q4 2024, although an exact date of arrival has yet to be confirmed.
Neelesh Man Singh Pradhan, CEO of NCHL, expects the introduction of the systems to be “a significant stride in Nepal to reform and consolidate the entire payment ecosystem”.
He adds that the partnership with ACI “aligns with our mission to facilitate the development of secure and trusted new payment methods and technologies in Nepal”.
