A rapid rise in usage of the new national instant payment platform BIMPay has pushed transactions past one million and $2bn within weeks of its launch, with the Central Bank reporting improving system performance and fewer failed payments.

Deputy Governor Michelle Doyle told a press conference on Thursday called to review the island’s economic performance for the first half of this year that, up to Wednesday, some 1.3 million transactions were processed on the BimPay platform since its launch in mid-June.

“That equates to $2.2bn in value; and obviously, those numbers are encouraging for us. More importantly, though, when we look at the level of time-outs, which is where the responsiveness of participants to payment messages being sent, we have seen that that continues to fall. So, it’s closer to zero, to approximately 0.3 per cent of all transactions. So, we know we are moving in the right direction in terms of the system stabilising.”