The concept behind the Payment Exchange Name (PEN) is to provide a nick-name based person-to-person (peer-to-peer (P2P)) payment option to customers in a convenient, secure and an error free manner to make electronic payments. Currently LankaPay – Common Electronic Fund Transfer Switch (LankaPay – CEFTS) offers the facility for customers of commercial banks and finance companies in Sri Lanka to make real-time electronic fund transfers. PEN would reduce the mistakes that one could make in terms of entering the wrong information when making an electronic fund transfer. If the funds are transferred to a wrong account, a customer has to go through a rigorous process to recover funds and at times may not be able to recover the funds at all. PEN reduces the risk of such mistakes significantly by allowing a fund transfer based on the intended recipient’s mobile number.
Financial institutions which offer their customers the PEN payment option would assign a nickname for the accounts held by the customer. These nicknames would be associated with the mobile phone number registered by the customer with the relevant financial institution. Once this process is completed, customers are able to make fund transfers to customers of the same financial institution or another financial institution with the ease of selecting only the mobile number and the nickname of the account holder ensuring the accuracy and the security of the fund transfer.
