eNaira might be the breakthrough for payment as CBN intensifies adoption

The apex bank is views expanding the use cases of the Central Bank digital currency (CBDC), increasing its adoption and making it more relevant to the payment ecosystem.

The pilot phase was unveiled with limited use cases, with a focus on person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-business (P2B) transactions.

But Jimoh, who was represented by Chai Gang, said the next phase of the project would see the use cases expanded to make eNaira more scalable and relevant to all socio-economic strata. He disclosed CBN was also looking at onboarding Nigerians without smartphones and leveraging unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to reach “the financially-excluded individuals” as well as places with low Internet connectivity.

“We are looking at developing offline use cases through USSD, which does not need strong data. Wearables will also help in areas where there is no Internet network. With these, people could just tap and transact as they go,” the director said.

CITN President, Adesina Adebayo, is hopeful a wider adoption of digital naira will help the government to increase tax revenue as it is expected to help relevant agencies to monitor and track transactions. He said the CBN would also provide a regulatory backbone for the disruptive cryptocurrency.