PNG’s economy to find strength in private sector: Teria

PAPUA New Guinea’s economy will find its strength in the private sector, Bank of Papua New Guinea (BPNG) deputy governor Joe Teria says.
Teria said this last week during the opening of the ANZ corporate centre in Port Moresby.
He said that was why BPNG was committed to ensure that investors were comfortable with the regulatory environment.
“The economy will find its strength in the private sector, the corporate sector going forward,” he said.
“So when ANZ opted to give its retail business to Kina Bank, we from BPNG, took it as a positive step, we need a corporate bank that can drive investment in this country by the corporate sector.
“By releasing the retail to Kina, Kina is able to support that sector in an economy and ANZ through its strategy, which we hope that will bring in better financial products to help the corporate sector grow and grow this economy to what it should be and what everybody wants.”
Teria congratulated ANZ for servicing the corporate sector into the future and said there were strategies to make financial systems in the country work better.
“Strategies that collectively doing with the commercial banks, financial institutions, you would notice that in the last few years, we have brought our payment system to another level to help the economy,” he said.
“We introduce real time gross settlements to allow big value payments to go regularly through the payment system, we introduced the automated clearing house for cheques which has reduced clearing times for cheques from 30 days and to two days.
“We have introduced direct credits which can be credited to customer accounts, during the clearing sessions, and we plan to bring that to real time to next year when we upgrade the payment system.”