The Registrar General’s Department (RGD) will today open its first non-cash office in Kingston to serve persons in the Corporate Area, the Jamaica Information Service has reported.

The office, located at 31 Half-Way-Tree Road, forms part of the RGD’s thrust to decentralise its services, and will open from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm daily.

According to Dawn Douglas, deputy chief executive officer and director of operations at the RGD, customers will now be able to apply for birth, death and marriage certificates and record updating services at the Half-Way-Tree location, which previously served only as a Local District Registrar’s office that facilitated birth and death registration.

“Persons who have either visited the location or called, have wanted to make applications for births, deaths and marriages, so we are responding to that demand now,” she explained, adding that the RGD was committed to being accessible to customers and making sure they were satisfied.

Douglas said that the development of the branch was part of the modernisation process to bring the Local District Registrars (representatives of the RGD) together in clusters. Registration services previously available at the Hagley Park Health Centre and Little Kew Road, will be integrated at this branch.

The branch, she explained, would operate similarly to the regional offices located in Montego Bay, St James; Mandeville, Manchester; and St Ann’s Bay, St Ann.

Douglas noted that the most important feature of the Half-Way-Tree branch is that it will be a non-cash facility. Customers, she said, would be required to transact business using any of the following non-cash payments – credit and debit cards, manager’s cheques and postal and money orders.

She said that research showed that the office “would be better off being a non-cash branch”, and that a number of customers “do not necessarily wish to operate using cash”.