The Bank of Namibia's Instant Payment Programme, an initiative to modernise the country's financial system, is now expected to launch in the third quarter of 2026.
The Instant Payment Platform (IPP) of the programme will enable real-time digital payments and will also support government-to-person payments.
IPP is being developed by the Bank of Namibia (BoN) in partnership with an Indian company, NPCI International, as well as support from Namclear and Price Waterhouse Coopers.
The launch was recently delayed to the third quarter of 2026 by the minister of finance, Ericah Shafudah.
Many Namibians expected to be able to make instant payments by the first half of 2026 after earlier delays from a late 2025 launch date.
The director of strategy, projects, and transformation at the Bank of Namibia, Valeria Mbango, detailed the main technical reasons behind the Instant Payment Programme's delay.
"National payment systems are quite complex, and it involves quite a lot of integration with multiple stakeholders. In this case we have banks, non-banks, and infrastructure providers. So, during the implementation process, we did realise that we needed to do additional work to just ensure that all participating institutions, including the Bank of Namibia, in fact, just meet the standards that are necessary for real-time payment systems. And particularly in areas that concern integration and security testing, as well as just operational readiness from the participants' side, because they also need to be ready to phase and be able to support consumers on the ground."
Mbango also explained the key advantages of IPP for the Namibian economy.
The Instant Payment Programme aims to build a national payment infrastructure to support financial inclusion, particularly in the informal sector and rural communities, by enabling local banks to operate on a unified system operated by Instant Payment Namibia.
Marsorry Ickua, the chief operating officer of Instant Payment Namibia, updated us on the current implementation stage of Namibia's Instant Payment Platform.
"We've moved out of the design phase of our project, and we're now in the implementation and testing phase. The core design work is largely complete, and the platform is now being built and validated."
Ickua said Namibians can expect a secure and stable Instant Payment Platform upon its launch.
"Security and trust are central to the platform's design. All of the transactions that will flow between instant payments in Namibia, as well as all of our participants, banks and non-banks, will be digitally signed. So we have, like, certificates that will encrypt those messages between our respective entities. We will also try to comply with industry standards such as ISO 27001 or PCI DSS. And these are standards that have already been adopted by our payment industry, and it's already sort of a compliance measure through our regulator."