The Asian Clearing Union (ACU) took the Japanese yen (JPY) in its basket as the third trading currency to boost business activities among its member-countries.
According to officials in Dhaka, the accession of the third currency came following a decision taken at a board meeting held in Colombo on July 13 with Indrajith Coomaraswamy, Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, in the chair.
"The transaction rules and procedures will be amended after getting minutes of the ACU board-of-directors meeting," a senior official of Bangladesh Bank (BB) told the FE Sunday.
Currently, the US dollar and the European euro are used for payment among the member-countries of the Union. A three-member Bangladesh delegation, headed by BB Governor Fazle Kabir, attended the board meeting.
As part of the board decisions, a delegation of the nine-member union, led by its Secretary-General Lida Borhan-Azad, will visit ASEAN countries to increase the number of ACU members, according to the BB official.
ACU is an arrangement among Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives through which intra-regional transactions among the participating central banks are settled on a multilateral basis.
The union started its operation in November 1975 to boost trade among the Asian countries.
Bangladesh and Myanmar joined the union as the sixth and seventh members in 1976 and 1977 respectively.
Bhutan joined the ACU in December 1999 and the Maldives in January 2010.
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Source: The Financial Express