9/97: Electronic transfer of statutory information As mentioned in the 1996 Annual Report, this Office is implementing an electronic transfer system in order to enhance the efficiency of data transfer between banking institutions and the Bank Supervision Department. During April 1997 six banks were requested to take part in a pilot project, in order to enable this Office to resolve any system problems prior to full implementation of the electronic submission of DI returns by banking institutions. The institutions that participated in the pilot project, and whose co-operation is hereby acknowledged, are, in alphabetical order:•ABSA Bank Limited•First National Bank of Southern Africa Limited•Investec Bank Limited•Nedcor Bank Limited•Société Générale•The Standard Bank of South Africa Limited  As soon as the South African Reserve Bank ("SARB’) was able to successfully receive and decrypt, encrypted DI returns from a few of the pilot-project banks without problems, it was decided to issue Banks Act Circular 7/97, dated 1997-08-25, requiring all banks to implement systems to submit statutory DI returns to this Office in an electronic format.As each institution completes the development of their systems and successfully submit encrypted statutory DI returns to the development environment of SARB, they will be supplied with the production environment address of the SARB and will submit their institution’s DI returns electronically from that date onwards.The latest date for implementation will be the fifteenth working day of March 1998, when the information for the period ended 1998-02-28 is submitted.To date all the banking institutions, except one, have decided to use the Internet and PSMP encryption, which complies with the PGP standard, to submit their statutory DI returns.This Office believes that the new system should enable us to receive more timely and accurate information from the banks and assist us in releasing more timely and accurate information relating to the banking sector.