Heritage, 5 others to open 774,000 FG job accounts

Heritage Bank, Zenith, UBA, Access, Fidelity and FCMB are the six banks engaged by the federal government to open accounts for beneficiaries of the Special Public Works (SPW) programme across the 774 LGAs in the country.

The Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, Festus Keyamo, announced the issuance of letters of engagement to the six Nigerian banks via his twitter handle.

All accounts will be opened with Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) for the 774,000 participants of the SPW Programme in their branches in the 774 local governments.

The minister said, “The banks assured us that even in LGAs where they don’t have branches, temporary registration centres would be opened in such LGAs so that the participants would not have to travel far to open their accounts.”

In his comment, the MD/CEO of Heritage Bank, Ifie Sekibo, said engaging the bank on such an arrangement was a demonstration of its commitment to using financial inclusion to boost entrepreneurship development, which is critical to its mission to create, preserve and transfer wealth across generations.

“On the economic level, you know that entrepreneurship drives employment, it drives social change, so we are really doing it for both social and economic change,” he said.