Employees Provident Fund starts online loan repayment; customers can make online loan payment via all 55 member BFIs of ConnectIPS
Employee Provident Fund (EPF) has started the loan re-payment of its various types of loans such as Revolving loan, Education loan, Home loan, Home Maintenance loan, and Special loan, through connectIPS e-Payment. Such loan repayment will be credited at the bank accounts of EPF being held at Himalayan Bank Ltd., Machhapuchhre Bank Ltd., and NIC Asia Bank Ltd.
With this digital initiative for online loan repayment, the loanee of EPF will be able to repay its loan installment online directly from bank accounts through connectIPS. Such a bank account could be held at any of the 55 member banks and financial institutions. The account holders will no longer need to go to EPF office or its designated bank for such repayments.
For the repayment of the loan, the customers need to have a user in connectIPS with at least one bank account linked (any of the member BFIs) and verified in the system that can be used to login to www.connectips.com. The customer selects the EPF Loan Re-payment options and then chooses its bank account for making the payment. The customer will have to select the loan to be paid and fill other needed information like mobile number or alternatively KYC Reference Number (UCIN) and customer name. After submission of the payment, the customer's selected bank account will be debited and credits EPF's designated bank account held at Himalayan Bank Ltd., Machhapuchhre Bank Ltd., and NIC Asia Bank Ltd. along with the information also being updated at the internal system of EPF.
EPF and NCHL had entered into an understanding last July for using National Payments Interface (NPI) to enable digital bank account based payouts and collections, corresponding to which the disbursement of approved collateral-based loan directly into the respective EPF contributor’s bank account has been in operations since last year. There have been more than 32 thousand transactions equivalent to NRs. 5.36 Billion processed to date for EPF loan disbursements. And now, EPF has also started its online loan repayment process from its contributions, which is a major milestone achieved in the path toward digitization of EPF. It also plans to roll-out other digital services including the collection of employee contributions by institutions.
NCHL has been operating NCHL-ECC, NCHL-IPS, connectIPS e-Payment, connectRTGS, and National Payments Interface (NPI) and providing access to its payment infrastructures to various non-bank institutions like insurance, remittance, merchant banks, PSPs, PSOs, Government & Semi-Government entities and others as indirect/ technical members. NPI is a consolidated interface (APIs) that works as a single channel for interconnection with multiple underlying core systems and is designed to facilitate the participants to initiate and process their payments through connectIPS and NCHL-IPS, which have 55 and 64 members BFIs respectively within its network.
EPF is established as an autonomous provident fund organization under Karmachari Sanchaya Kosh Act 2019 with the objective of managing the provident funds in Nepal and is one of the largest fund managers with total contributors of over 5.5 lakh and 30 thousand contributing offices. In the recent past, EPF has been driving its strategy to provide all its products and services through digital channels.
