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.

However, this news was buried in the turmoil that the currency market experienced in March. In fact, rumors that the implementation of NIMA would make any unconventional currency transactions impossible may have partly contributed to the rush of many groups to secure hard currency holdings for their future needs.

In the aftermath of the recent currency crisis and the introduction of a unified exchange rate, the government suddenly announced the introduction of NIMA as the single platform to streamline “all hard currency transactions” by establishing the exact volumes of supply and demand for merchants (importers and exporters), corporations and even individuals who may need hard currency for travel and studies, and so forth. In other words, an online system that initially had been designed to provide a platform for marginal hard currency transactions has been elevated to be the main portal for all such transactions.