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I asked for this session because I want to speak plainly to the people of Barbados about BiMPay. Not in the language of central bankers. Straight talk.
BiMPay went live on June 12, as promised, with all nine participating institutions connected to the payment rail. Seven were also ready to support customer onboarding to the BiMPay app, while the remaining two were placed on defined implementation timelines. It is the country’s national instant payment system, and it belongs to Barbados. We built it to allow customers of participating institutions to send money across institutions instantly, at any hour, without paying a fee to initiate the transfer.
I know that some of you have had a difficult experience over these past weeks. A salary that did not arrive on time. A payment that left your account and then went quiet. An app for which finding the token to link your account proved rather difficult. I am not going to sit here and pretend those things did not happen. They happened, and they should not have. I do not intend to leave them unfixed, and I do not intend to explain them away.
You are entitled to an explanation. This morning I am going to give you one.
To understand what has gone wrong, and what has not, you need to understand what a payment is made of.
The core BiMPay payment rail is functioning and processing transactions in real time. But a payment service is more than its core rail. It also depends on the systems and processes of the financial institutions connected to it: their customer data, their onboarding, their apps, the limits they set, how they post funds to your account, and how they handle a payment that goes wrong.
Many of the difficulties customers have experienced have arisen at that institutional layer.
I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds from where you sit. If money leaves your account and does not arrive, you do not care which part of the chain failed. You care that it failed. I understand that, and I accept that the Central Bank is accountable for ensuring that the system, including the institutions connected to it, delivers the service the public was promised. That is exactly why we have intervened as we have.
Let me give you the facts about the rail itself.
Since BiMPay went live one month ago, it has carried close to 750K successful transactions, moving $1.3 billion across the financial system. That is just in one month.
On Friday alone, this past Friday, the BiMPay Rail carried 28,725 successful transactions worth over $60 million. Not overnight, in a batch. In seconds.
On the e-wallet, more than 24,000 people have registered, and more than 13,700 have linked an account to their wallet. Those wallets have carried transactions worth just over $1.4 million.
The failure rate on the rail, meaning cases where a financial institution does not respond in time to a payment message, so the payment was cancelled. The message went out. The rail did its job. The financial institution did not answer. That is happening on fewer than one payment in every 500 transactions, 0.2 percent, and that rate is falling.
But I do not want that number to sit there as a statistic, because it is not one. Over the last month, that 0.2 percent failure rate represented salaries that did not reach a worker's account on payday; pensions that did not reach a pensioner. That is what a failed payment is. It is not a percentage. It is somebody's pay, and somebody's month.
So where an institution’s payments have been failing, we have not simply noted it and moved on. We have required that institution to find the cause, to fix it, and to report back to us on both. And while it is doing so, required them to put the money in the customer’s account. In other words, we have asked them to issue provisional credits, meaning: if your salary or your pension did not arrive because something failed between your employer and your FI, your institution is to credit you now, and sort the problem out afterwards. You should not be made to wait on their systems. That is the standard we have set, and I will keep pressing it.
And let me give you one piece of evidence that this mandatory requirement for institutions works. At the end of June, one institution was timing out on the majority of the payments it was handling, and its results were materially weakening the overall performance figures for the system. We put it under intensive remediation, with deadlines. On Friday, that same institution processed more than a thousand payments and recorded not a single failure. Not one. That is what happens when the Central Bank insists, and it is what we intend to repeat across every institution that is falling short.
So when you hear that BiMPay does not work, understand what is true. The rail is robust and it is functioning as it was designed to. It is fast, it is carrying real money for real people, and the core of it works.
Now let me be candid, because that persons deserve candour and not comfort.
BiMPay currently depends on nine financial institutions, all nine on the rail and seven on the e-wallet. Your bank or your credit union sits between you and the system. They hold your account. They process and post payments to customer accounts. They control the banking channels you use to connect to the BiMPay central rail.
Now, I want to walk you through four problems that have arisen at that layer, what each meant for ordinary people, and what the Central Bank has done about it.
The first problem was salaries, and I want to be precise about it, because there has been a great deal of misinformation.
When your employer pays you, they send a payroll file to their bank. That file must carry your account details in the correct format. If the details are wrong, or the format is wrong, the payment fails. This applies when it is a salary, pension or any other payment.
And let me tell you what wrong looks like, because it is not exotic. An account number that is incorrect or has two digits transposed. A credit union member number used where the deposit account number was required. A branch code for a bank that no longer trades under that name. A name on the file that does not match the name on the account. Small things. But an instant system cannot guess, and it will not guess. It fails the payment.
Here is the part that has not been said plainly enough. This problem did not begin with BiMPay system. Those formatting and account information errors existed under the old system. The difference is that under the old batch system, a bank could take that faulty file, correct it by hand overnight in their back office, and push the payment through, and you would never know. In an instant system, there is no overnight. There is no overnight process in which someone manually corrects the file before the payment is posted. If the information is wrong, the payment fails, immediately and transparently.
And I will tell you something else. Some public officers experienced exactly these delays in February and March of this year, before BiMPay went live as well.
The Central Bank raised the issue of proper payment message formatting with the financial institutions in late 2025. Some of them did the work, directed their customers and cleaned up their files. Others did not complete the process. That is a matter of record.
So on June 19, the first payday after go-live, some Barbadians did not get paid on time. In those cases, the payment did not fail because the BiMPay rail was unavailable. It failed because the account information submitted to the rail was invalid or incorrectly formatted.
Here is what the Central Bank did. We did not simply write a letter and wait. We formed a Payroll Command Cell at the Central Bank, comprising the chief executives of the six banks and three credit unions connected to the BiMPay rail, together with the Accountant General, the Comptroller General and the National Insurance and Social Security Service, and we worked payment by payment, employer by employer, to trace those salaries and get people paid. Our primary interest was simple: that everyone gets paid.
As of Friday, we were advised by these parties that almost all June salaries and pensions have been paid.
We instructed the institutions that no customer is to be charged for correcting their information, nor to bear any late penalty they incurred because their salary was delayed. And we instructed them to apply provisional credit where a customer did not receive their salary or pension. Let me be honest with you: I am not satisfied that enough institutions used that provision or used it quickly enough.
We have now required every institution to complete the validation work and provide chief executive certification of the results. The chief executives, personally, in their own name, certifying that every one of their corporate clients has been contacted, that the payroll file has been corrected, and that the corporate client holds the corrected file. The Government and the National Insurance and Social Security Service worked through their files as well, working closely with their respective financial institutions.
Some of those certifications by the Fis to us were complete. Others did not provide the assurance or evidence required and were returned for further work. That exercise continues this week, and it will be completed before the July pay cycle. The Payroll Command Cell will remain active through this July cycle to ensure that Barbadians are paid on time.
And you can help. If your salary or pension was delayed in June, please verify your banking information with your employer’s HR or Finance department, or with the National Insurance and Social Security Service in the case of a pension.
The second problem is about getting you onto the system in the first place.
Now the BIMPay system includes a BIMPay e-wallet, which we know will bring tremendous benefits to all Barbadians, especially individuals, micro, and small businesses. To link your bank/credit union account to your BiMPay e-wallet, you need a token from your bank or credit union. It should be simple. You open your banking app, you see a clear button saying Generate BiMPay Token, you tap it, you are on.
In several institutions, token access was located too deeply within their existing digital banking channels, was labelled unclearly, or required customers to navigate through additional proprietary services.
Understand what that does. If a customer cannot find the door, the customer does not come in. That is a part of why more than 24,000 people have registered a wallet but only some 13,700 have gone on to link an account. People registered, tried to link, could not find their way, and gave up. That gap reflects friction in the onboarding arrangements established by the institutions.
So the Central Bank has issued a common customer access standard. Token generation must be on the home page of the online banking channel or app, reachable with the tap of a clearly labelled button, with no proprietary product in the path. As an interim measure, institutions must display on their home page the words: BiMPay, Barbados’s national instant payment service, is available here. To link your account, click Menu, then select Generate BiMPay Token. The same standard applies to all nine institutions.
Some institutions have complied. Some are close to complying. Some have submitted proposals that do not meet the standard, and those have been returned to amend. I will keep at this until a customer at any institution in this country can find that button in seconds.
The third problem we uncovered as we worked through the others, and it troubles me.
Institutions set limits on how much you can send. That is normal and proper. A limit should reflect your profile as a customer: your history, your risk.
But we have found institutions setting limits on the BiMPay e-wallet that sit below the limits those same customers already hold on the institution’s own online channels and apps.
Consider a customer who can send $2,000 through their bank’s own platform. Same customer, same account, same institution, same risk profile. On the BiMPay App, which is the national payments app, that customer is capped at $500. Nothing about the customer changed. The only thing that changed is which app they chose to use.
The Central Bank’s position is this. A lower limit cannot simply be imposed because the customer is using their BiMPay App. Any difference must be based on a documented risk assessment relating to that customer or channel, and it must be capable of proper justification to the Central Bank. BiMPay limits should ordinarily align with the limits already approved for the same customer.
These issues and differences only became clear as we investigated customer complaints and reviewed each institution’s implementation in detail.
The fourth problem is the one that worries people most, and I want to address it directly. Some of you have sent a payment, received a confirmation, and then the money did not reach the person you sent it to.
Let me be precise, because precision matters here. The funds have not disappeared. Nobody’s money has vanished.
What is happening is one of two things. In some cases, the money arrives at the recipient’s financial institution but is not promptly lodged to their account. In other cases, the customer receives a successful confirmation even though the institution has not completed the debit and payment process correctly. Neither of those is a failure of the BiMPay rail. Both are matters within the institutions, and they are limited to a few of them.
The principle BiMPay exists on is simple. When money leaves an account, it must be credited to an account instantly. Let me explain what we mean by instant, because it is not a figure of speech. The BiMPay Scheme Rulebook sets it out. Account verification must be completed within five seconds. An instant credit transfer must be completed within ten seconds. Those are the standards, they are written down, and every institution signed up to them. Money should not be held in a suspense account and credited to the recipient later.
The Central Bank is therefore examining every institution for queuing between BiMPay and its core systems, and requiring each to confirm that payments are submitted, received, and posted to customer accounts without material delay. Where material queueing or delayed posting is identified, the institution will be required to remediate it promptly. Where necessary, the Central Bank will conduct an audit in accordance with its statutory powers.
And in the meantime, the customer must be protected. Where a customer has been debited and the institution cannot resolve the payment within the required timeframe, we have directed the institution to apply appropriate customer protection measures, including provisional credit where the circumstances warrant it. The customer should not be left waiting on an institution’s systems.
There are three further matters I want to deal with quickly, because people have raised them and they deserve an answer.
Blank payment narrations. Some individuals and businesses are receiving payments that simply say Central Bank or BiMPay, instead of naming the sender and the reason for the payment. For a business trying to reconcile its accounts, that is useless. The payment information exists within the transaction message, but some institutions have not been displaying it properly to their customers. We have directed every institution to ensure that the sender and the payment reference are shown. Some have already corrected this. The others have been told to expedite it, and frankly this is a practice they should have carried across from the old system in the first place.
Date of birth. Some wallet users have found the wrong date of birth on their profile, in some cases the date they registered. Let me be clear about where that comes from. The Central Bank does not collect your date of birth when you register. That information is supplied to the app by your financial institution. We have required the institutions to correct it, and most have.
The iPhone loop. A software bug affected registration or password entry on some iPhones. The vendor identified the problem and corrected it.
There has been confusion about fees, and some of you have believed the Central Bank is charging you. Let me put that to rest.
The Central Bank does not charge any customer any fee. Not to send a payment, not to receive one, and not to raise or resolve a dispute. We do not receive a cent from your transactions.
For individuals, BiMPay is free. It was built that way, and it stays that way.
For micro and small businesses, our expectation is that BiMPay will be free or low cost depending on the size of your business, and we will hold institutions to that standard.
For corporate customers, an institution may in time apply a fee. But understand whose fee that is. It is the institution’s, not the Central Bank’s, and we receive none of it.
I have directed that no institution may charge any customer a fee for a BiMPay transfer that the customer initiates, or a fee to raise or resolve a dispute arising from such a transfer. That directive is in force now, and every institution has been required to confirm in writing that it is complying.
And this is the part I want no one to miss. No financial institution may charge any customer any BiMPay fee before the 15th of September. Not an individual, not a small business, and not a corporate customer. Not one cent.
Before any fee is charged, three things must happen. The institution must submit its proposed fee structure to the Central Bank. We must review and evaluate it. And the institution must tell its customers what it intends to charge, before it charges them. You will hear about your institution’s fees in September, and not before. And even then, BiMPay remains free to individuals.
Our commitment is simple. BiMPay was built to be a low-cost national payment service, and it will remain one. Where an institution proposes to charge, it will have to justify it to us.
I want to be measured here, because I am the regulator, and matters are before me. I am not going to sit here and impute motives.
But I will state facts. On the things that make a payment system easy for the public to adopt, placing token access on the front page of online banking apps where customers can find it, setting limits that reflect the customer, correcting account data, posting funds promptly, the institutions have not moved with the urgency this country needed. In several cases, implementation choices gave insufficient prominence and accessibility to BiMPay within the institution’s existing digital channels. And in too many cases, these matters came to light through the Central Bank’s own investigation rather than being brought to us.
The formatting problem was known to them since last year. Guidance on the token configuration was issued in February this year, and the token standard is not complicated. Setting a customer’s limit consistently with their own profile is not complicated. None of this was beyond them.
Their obligations under the National Payment System Act are not optional, and they are not negotiable. I will enforce them.
Let me end by speaking directly to you.
I encourage you to use BiMPay, not just the rail but the app as well. The core rail is sound, over $1.3 billion has moved across it in a month, transactions are settling in seconds, and the Central Bank is requiring the remaining customer experience problems to be corrected.
If you have had a bad experience, I understand why you would hesitate. But understand what caused the difficulty, what has been corrected, and what remains to be done. The Central Bank is addressing each issue, and will continue to do so, institution by institution, and will not stop until the service delivery works properly for the customer from beginning to end.
Barbados is not doing anything exotic here. The International Monetary Fund’s own report on Barbados, published last month, notes that instant payment systems have now been introduced in more than 120 countries. It also notes that these systems succeed where the central bank establishes its role firmly, where the major institutions are required to participate properly, where fees are kept low, and where the customer is put first. That is precisely the road we are on, and we will stay on it.
This system belongs to you. Not to financial institutions. To you. And I intend to see that it serves you.