As the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) gains traction, the value of the daily transactions on the various electronic payment platforms has peaked at N100 billion.
Similarly, the point-of-sales (PoS) platform now processes, at least, N1.5 billion worth of transactions daily.
The CBN Director, Banking and Payment System Department, Mr. Dipo Fatokun, disclosed these yesterday in Abuja at the CBN electronic payment incentives scheme cash reward presentation to the winners.
“About N100bn worth of transactions are done every day on the various e-payment platforms. Out of this, at least N1.5bn transaction is on the point-of-sales (PoS) platform for which this award is being given,” he noted.
The CBN incentive rewards customers who use the PoS to do transactions and the winners are selected randomly.
At yesterday’s event, three customers walked home with N100,000, N50,000 and N35,000 for first, second and third places respectively.
“The award was introduced in 2014 to encourage e-payments in Nigeria. This is the second edition. It incentivizes three categories of people in the payment scheme. It rewards the card holder, the merchant and the sales person,” he explained.
In this first instance, the card holder is being rewarded, but soon, the merchants and sales representatives will also be rewarded, Mr Fatokun said.
According to him, Nigeria now has over 120,000 PoS terminals (desktop PoS) in use, adding that more mobile PoS are being deployed to deepen the PoS penetration across the country. He noted that the PoS are cheaper, easier to deploy and complete more transactions successfully than the desktop PoS do.
“In terms of penetration, we are not there yet,” he said. “Nigeria has a population of about 170 million people, thus if you look at the penetration in term of ratio, it is still small. But if you juxtapose it with the 2011 December figure when we commenced the cashless policy, we have really moved fast because we had less than 5000 PoS across the country then,” he noted.
The CBN will soon be commencing the purchase and cash-back scheme. When this becomes operational, Fatokun disclosed, a card holder can walk up to a merchant, make some purchase and also make some cash withdrawals for a token charge of N100. He quickly added, “But there is a limit to the amount of cash you can withdraw.”
The apex bank hopes this new system will reduce queues at the ATMs as part of its efforts to ensure the success of the cashless economy.
Mr. Ade Shonubi, the Managing Director/CEO, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement Systems PLC (NIBSS), revealed at the event that NIBSS, the CBN and other stakeholders are discussing with the telecommunications companies to ensure seamless connectivity.
Shonubi decried a situation where PoS attendants deliberately refuse to use the machine on the pretext it is not available “because they would love to keep the change.”
