29 December 2017 09:56 am
The path is open for global payments platform Paypal to open up inward payment services to Sri Lanka if they wish to do so, since the Central Bank had pledged to provide regulatory space, top officials at the monetary regulatory authority said.
“When they were here the last time, we agreed to do whatever necessary to let them do business here,” Dr. Weerasinghe said.
As outward payments have been enabled, Paypal, through a local bank, was exploring the possibility of opening up inward flows of payments to Sri Lanka in 2015, Dr. Coomaraswamy said.
This has limited the capacity of Sri Lankan small scale entrepreneurs to compete via global digital platforms such as eBay.
Direct payment portals for credit and debit cards set up by banks are not affordable for some of the small scale businesses.
The ICT Agency of the government had said in late 2015 that Paypal was not opening up inward payments due to complexities in Sri Lanka’s draconian Exchange Control Act. A more modern Foreign Exchange Act was implemented recently.
However, Dr. Weerasinghe said that Paypal had decided not to implement its full service package in Sri Lanka because there were low transaction volumes in Sri Lanka, and not because there were regulatory limitations.
“It was purely a decision based on the business proposition,” he said.
Dr. Weerasinghe said that he had met the Paypal CEO during a recent conference in Singapore, and they had discussed the possibility of Paypal conducting a feasibility study again. Mirror Business reliably learned that a Paypal team may be visiting Sri Lanka in mid January to re-establish links in Sri Lanka.
Dr. Weerasinghe confirmed that there was a discussion on Paypal sending a team to Sri Lanka, but that he was not sure of the timeline.