CBN says 54% of market traders in Port Harcourt are financially excluded

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says over 54 per cent of market traders and other economically active poor persons in Nigeria’s oil capital, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, are financially excluded, having no form of bank accounts.

For this reason, the Financial Inclusion Secretariat (FIS) of the apex bank is devoting three days to meet the people with awareness messages and designated bank products to help cut down the gap.

The CBN has also revealed that the much-awaited geo-spatial financial map would be unveiled before the end of 2014 to make it easy for financial service providers to have an overview of services and their locations and clustering patterns around Nigeria.

The CBN started with a seminar for stakeholders and partners in the financial services sector including the commercial banks, Microfinance Banks (MFBs), Insurance companies, stock broking firms, as well as channels of financial delivery such as Automated Teller Machine (ATM) operators, point of sale (POS) owners, agent-bankers, and some others at its regional headquarters in Port Harcourt.

Several sector and policy experts were brought in to educate the stakeholders on various aspects of the financial inclusion strategy such as agent-banking guidelines, consumer protection/financial literacy framework, tiered K-Y-C framework (financial policy and regulation), cashless policy with shared services, etc.

The head, CBN’s FIS, Temitope Akin-Fadeyi, opened the exciting seminar with insight into the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS) and the work the FIS was doing.

She said a survey of Port Harcourt was previously carried out concentrating in the trading hub, Mile One to Mile Three markets where 1500 were polled. She revealed that 28 per cent said they were using informal forms of financial services such as esusu, showing that people actually hungered for financial services. Another 26 per cent, she stated, did however not have any financial services, making a whopping 54 per cent either totally financially excluded or informally served.

The survey further revealed that only 24 per cent of traders in the garden city had formal bank accounts while 20 per cent had other brands such as cooperatives. She said 28 per cent said they had no financial capacity to embrace banking while 20 per cent feared they would lose their money in the banks. A whopping 22 per cent stubbornly did not want anything to do with banks.

For this reason, she said, the CBN was tinkering with its fiscal policy engineering to entice the unbanked while also dragging along the financial service providers to the various business hot spots in the garden city to showcase financial products. She said there may be need to do more to encourage the people to embrace banking services.