Tehran, Iran, July 18
By Kamyar Eghbalnejad, A. Shirazi - Trend
The chief executive of FABA, a government-owned center for promotion of electronic banking, said Iran’s financial transaction systems will not be directly affected by the new US sanctions.
Our financial transaction systems are all developed domestically and impending US sanctions cannot affect them, Mohammad Morad Bayat, told Trend on July 16.
"Shaparak and Shetab are two national and domestic switches and the sanctions will not affect them."
He added that the country could do transactions with different countries to transfer money.
"We have integrated our banking systems with Iraq and Turkey and are currently doing transactions with them," he said.
Iranians are able to use their credit cards in Turkey, and we are pursuing the same plan with Russia, Bayat said.
This could help facilitate the volume of banking transactions between Iran and other countries at the international level, he said.
The Central Bank of Iran has registered more than 1.5 billion transactions in one month, Bayat concluded.
Iranian banks are now facing a major problem, as they are not connected to global electronic payment terminals and providers of secure financial messaging services.
SWIFT – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – is used by nearly every bank around the world to send payment messages that lead to the transfer of money across international borders. It provides a wide range of service including transmitting letters of credit, payments and securities transactions among 9,700 banks in 209 countries.
Following the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and the ensuing removal of anti-Tehran sanctions, Global transaction network SWIFT reconnected a number of Iranian banks to its system, allowing them to resume cross-border transactions with foreign banks
However, US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the international agreement has dissuaded foreign banks from doing trade with Iran.
The first round of US sanctions on Iran goes into effect in August, followed by ones targeting Iran's oil exports in November.