On April 10, Iranian authorities announced a policy of unification of exchange rates — a move that has generated confusion, especially among those economic players who relied on the country’s free currency market. The fact is that the newly unified rate of 42,000 rials to the US dollar is not yet widely available. At best, it is only available to those importers who had access to the so-called forex chamber rate, which was previously at about 37,000 rials to the greenback. As such, this equates to an actual devaluation of the national currency. In line with returning calm to the market, one of the most recent steps by the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has been to expand an already existing online system referred to by its Persian acronym NIMA (Integrated System for Hard Currency Transactions). The question is whether NIMA will succeed in addressing the needs of the Iranian economy.
NIMA was originally put in place in February as a pilot project and gradually took shape during the month of March. In its initial format, NIMA was designed as a central platform to register hard currency needs of importers and other groups “outside the banking sector.” That system was meant to induce transparency into the dealings of foreign exchange bureaus, which have been an integral part of the country’s hard currency management system alongside other financial institutions. As a first step, on March 2, the CBI held a workshop for representatives of foreign exchange bureaus that are affiliated with mainstream banks to introduce NIMA and also prepare the grounds for their connectivity with the integrated system — a system in which merchants were supposed to register their needs for imports that were not allocated currency at the lower forex chamber rate, and currency bureaus meet those needs through transparent and online transactions.
