• 'No going back on phase two project'
TOTAL value of daily electronic funds transfer in the country has risen to N80 billion, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said, attributing it to the introduction of the cash-less policy and indicating the growing acceptance of the policy by Nigerians.
The CBN Deputy Governor, Operations, Tunde Lemo, who disclosed this, explained that the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) recorded over N20 billion daily transactions, while the Nigeria Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) conducts about N60 billion transactions daily. NEFT payment is an irrevocable fund transfer instruction.
NIBSS provides the infrastructure for automated processing, settlement of payments and fund transfer instructions between banks, discount houses and card companies in Nigeria and is jointly owned by all the licensed banks in the country and CBN, with substantial shares held by discount houses operating in the country.
According to Lemo, both the value and volume of cash transactions executed through the NIBSS and the NEFT have doubled compared to the use of cheques. He said: "We have forgotten that the cash-less project also included high volume payment transactions such as the NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP). The NIP now moves between N20 and N40 billion worth of transactions daily.
"Through NEFT, we also have tens of thousands of transactions valued at over N60 billion daily. So, between NEFT and NIP, we have transactions that have now doubled the cheque transactions volume."
Lemo, who is responsible for driving the policy, said the additional states - Rivers, Kano, Anambra, Ogun and Abia, as well as the FCT - were chosen because of the large volume of cash transactions in some of their major cities.
"Recall that we started this programme actually in January last year and we are only just continuing, we are only just moving to phase two," he said. "So, we have learnt all the ropes in phase one (Lagos) and we believe we are ready to roll out to other six locations in Nigeria.
"We are actually working in collaboration with the Bankers' Committee. We have a sub-committee headed by the MD/CEO of UBA, who is the cash-less champion among the bank CEOs, and together with the other institutions like the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS)."
He added: "We are working very hard to ensure that we close all the gaps now. I can tell you that we already have our roadmap and we are not going to shift the implementation date of the phase two, which is July 1, 2013.
"We are ready to roll out to the six other states and there would be no change in date. We are not shifting the goal post. We have a roadmap, which is being followed, and we are fully prepared."
He disclosed that the previous challenge of the cash-less initiative, which was piloted in Lagos, centred on connectivity, stating: "We have over 150,000 Points of Sales (PoS) machines in Lagos area, but only 25 per cent of them are active, largely due to lack of General Packet Radio Service and connectivity in some of the clusters, and because of that, it has affected the rate at which those machines are used.
"We believe very much that it is getting better because we monitor the transactions on daily basis and are beginning to record large volumes and transactions value under the PoS. We are now looking at all the other major channels like the mobile telephone, which we will now use to drive the cash-less policy."
Under the policy, the banking watchdog pegged the daily cumulative cash withdrawal or deposit limit for individual accounts at N500, 000 per day and N3 million per day for corporate accounts.
The Guardian