Digital payment system gains solid ground in Qatar as cheque processing declines: QCB

Digital payment system is gaining solid ground in Qatar, QCB data reveal as the percentage of cheques processed to the total electronic fund transfers in the country declined from 63% in 2018 to 38% in 2021.
In its 13th Financial Stability Report, the Qatar Central Bank said this “underscores the shift in consumer preference for digital payment methods” in the country.
Despite introducing several electronic payment methods, cheques traditionally remained as one of the preferred payment modes in Qatar for a large segment of the population mainly because “cheques are considered as a sort of guarantee” on future payments, the QCB noted.
However, the use of cheques in Qatar has been consistently declining relative to other electronic payment modes.
The changes associated with Covid-19 have further accelerated the transition away from cheques as more people opted for digital alternatives.
In terms of absolute value, the number of cheques processed in the Electronic Cheque Clearing System (ECCS) in 2021 remained at 3.95mn, marginally lower than the last year.
Of which, 33,000 were high-value cheques with a face value of more than QR1mn and they were settled in RTGS on a gross basis. As in the previous year, the small value cheque payments with a face value of less than QR10,000 accounted for a major chunk (57.1%) of the total volume.
Similarly, the large value cheque payments with a face value of more than QR100,000 accounted for 7% of total transactions, but in terms of the value, they accounted for 78% of total payments settled in 2021.
The QCB noted that during the year, Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) settled 462,000 large value electronic transactions worth QR2.2bn on a gross basis, a growth of 35% in volume and 1.8% in value over the previous year.
In addition, RTGS settled batches of net interbank obligations arising from other payment systems and large value cheques on a gross basis.
The QCB manages a number of payment and settlement systems such as RTGS, ECCS, QATCH that facilitates fund transfers, NAPS (National ATM and Point of Sale Switch) that acts as an electronic payment gateway for switching and settling of ATM/POS/e-commerce transactions and the Qatar Mobile Payment System (QMPS).
As in the previous years, RTGS and NAPS continued to remain the most systemically important systems with RTGS handling 82.2% of the total customer and interbank payments in value terms and NAPS handling 91.1% of the payments in terms of volume, the QCB noted.