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Bank payments system working smoothly, says Bollard

Bank payments system working smoothly, says Bollard

Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard said New Zealand's bank payments system was working smoothly and he did not expect any problems because of turmoil on international credit markets. The Reserve Bank had worked to keep the inter-bank system liquid and New Zealand banks were now cashed up after the close of the financial year to September 30, Governor Alan Bollard told Radio New Zealand National in an interview this morning. "You can see around the world central banks have been keeping markets very liquid. We've been doing the same so there's a lot of cash in the system and the banks are very much cashed up," Bollard said. "Last night was quite a significant time for us because for most of the Australasian banks it was the end of the (financial) year -- September 30 -- and they wanted to make sure they were cashed up for that and they've gone through no problem at all," he said. "We already have the policies in place to ensure liquidity goes through that. We've been widening security that we'll take and that will help the banks to raise funds as well." "There's other things we could do but we just don't think we need to at the moment," he added. "Also, we do a lot of actions in the market and we get a lot of intelligence from that and we operate the wholesale payment sand settlement system so we see all the bank flows going through. At the minute all of things are working as they should."

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