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Azeri Post will launch banking and financial services this year

04 June 2009 12:16 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Nijat Mustafayev - APA-Economics. All post offices will provide the people banking and financial services across the country, said the Deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of Azerbaijan Elmir Velizadeh.

â€œThe World Bank supported project will be complete by this year-end. Then, post offices will provide banking services throughout the country after the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) issues a license to Azeri Post,â€ he added.

He also added that post offices in Baku have a practice of providing financial services such as international money transfers.

CBA officer for international relations said Farid Bakhshiyev said post offices will provide limited banking services.

â€œThe list of services will include the opening of current accounts, money transfers, and payment of utility and mobile bills, currency exchange, and suchlike services.

He didnâ€™t rule out the probability of loan lending by post offices in the long run.

Financial Services Development Project between the Government of Azerbaijan and the World Bank aims to facilitate improvement of the access of the rural population to financial services and improvements in the financial architecture and a component for Azeri Post to build the financial service capacity in rural areas that are presently undeserved or not served by the banking system and to improve access to basic business infrastructure and for delivery of Government services.
The cost of the project is $17.5 million, of which $12.5 million will be allocated by the World Bank and $5mln by the Government of Azerbaijan. The project will be complete by the end of 2008.
Azerbaijan has about 1,600 post points, of which about 1,400 are post offices and the rest are post agents.