Queues return as 21m of 45m accounts enrol for BVN – NIBSS

Only 21 million account holders out of 45 million accounts have as of Friday last week enrolled for the Bank Verification Number (BVN), according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS).

Consequently, five days to the October 31 dealine given by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)  for every bank customer to enrol and obtain their BVN, queues have returned to the banking halls, as people rush to beat the deadline.

The CBN and the Bankers’ Committee had in their last meeting in Lagos, agreed that there would be no extension to the deadline.

However, Ade Shonubi, managing director/CEO of NIBSS, is hopeful that at least 80 percent of the banking industry would have complied by the end of the October deadline.

Shonubi said that currently, about 12,000 Diaspora Nigerians had enrolled for the BVN, adding that 12 enrolling centres had been opened for the Diasporas and more were on the way.

“As at now, we have about 12 centres that have been opened in Diaspora. We expect in the next few days, another five or six in places like Australia, Malaysia and others will be opened,” he told journalists in Lagos, at the annual general meeting of NIBSS.

On the issue of e-fraud, he said, “one of the benefits of BVN is that every financial transaction can be identified to an individual sending or receiving, so we can easily know fraudsters. For the professional fraudsters, all financial transactions will be tagged and tracked.”

Responding to issues on PoS, Shonubi said ATM transactions were flat, while PoS transactions were actually growing, adding that there were 100,000 PoS out of which about 50 percent were active.

The CBN’s efforts to stimulate e-payment alternatives in the ecosystem have seen cheques’ clearing decline by 6 percent in transaction volume to 14 million in 2015 from 15 million in 2014.

However, it impacted PoS transaction volume positively by 77 percent growth, from 15 million in 2014 to 27 million in 2015, according to Sulaiman Barau, chairman of NIBSS.

Barau noted that NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) product had continued to gain increased acceptance as funds transfer platform as evidenced by the 92 percent growth in transaction volume from 28 million in 2014 to 54 million in 2015.

However, NIBSS Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT) transaction volume grew marginally by 4 percent to 39 million in 2015 from 38 million in 2014, due to customers’ affinity towards instant payment.

NIBSS’s total assets increased by 19 percent from N7.10 billion in 2014 to N8.49 billion in 2015, due to the increase in investment portfolio by N1.1 billion.

In the same vein, shareholders’ funds was N6.77 billion, up from the figure of N5.21 billion, representing 30 percent growth in prior year.

HOPE MOSES-ASHIKE