Relationship Between E-Municipality Application and Participation Finance

What is e-municipality?

All local authorities (metropolitan, provincial, district, town, water and sewerage administrations, unions) will take part in this system through 67 different modules and have an integrated infrastructure, thereby, minimizing the technical costs. Currently, 1,000 local authorities are partially or fully involved in this infrastructure. We can say that 9 banks have achieved systematic adaptation to this procedure, of which a pilot study was carried out with 34 municipalities.

All collections of municipalities for real estate, environment-cleaning, license, garbage, etc. have been carried out via the virtual POS on the website of the relevant municipality for a long time, and now citizens will be able to make these payments through the service channels of the banks (Branch, ATM, Internet Branch, Mobile Branch, and Telephone Banking). Even with the automatic payment method, such payments will be able to be made through banks.

Strategic Importance of Service

Having also mentioned this service that allows the municipalities to pay all their receivables via various channels in his opening speeches, Süleyman Soylu, Minister of Interior of the Republic of Türkiye, underlines the importance of this service. For this procedure that provides local authorities with flexibility and security in many various ways, the ministry has been working on infrastructure for about 5 years. A very significant technological breakthrough will be achieved in the future with the inclusion of all banks in this structure and the use of all modules by at least 1,000 local authorities until the end of 2023. The increase of such investments by our state paves the way for the necessary tendency towards technological innovations.

E-Municipality From the Point of Participation Banks

Why is this project important for participation banks? Seeing it as their duty to develop solutions for all payment transactions of citizens, with a broad service understanding and an approach of becoming an intermediary in real transactions, participation banks will be able to collect all other receivables of municipalities as well as standard bill payments. In particular, institutions operating as public participation banks will have the opportunity to work more deeply and efficiently with municipalities in line with the public treasurer's communiqué.

Having the advantage of providing many services in terms of technology, participation banks will bring more flexible payment methods to the citizens and contribute to the minimization of cyber dangers in the virtual world.

I believe that participation banks will show the necessary interest in the project under this mentality. I would like to state that we will keep monitoring the development of e-municipal services, which is an area of digital transformation, and that we will be seeing innovations in a very short time.

Salih Erbaş