Group decries mandatory CAC registration for PoS agents

…Says 1.5m jobs lost in one year

The Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria (AMMBAN) has decried the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) directive mandating all Point of Sale (PoS) agents to register with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).

AMMBAN stated this in a recent press statement where it insisted that the reason tendered by the regulator that the registration was to curb crime in the fintech space was not tenable, maintaining that it was purely revenue-driven agenda.

“The Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria (AMMBAN) strongly disagrees with the recent directive by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) that all PoS agents must register with it, regardless of their status as individuals or non-individuals. We believe this directive is unnecessary, contradictory to existing laws, and amounts to a mere revenue generation move to further tax hapless Nigerians”, it said.

AMMBAN stated that it had made and would still make spirited efforts in combating the issue of crimes within the Nigerian fintech ecosystem and condemned the insistence of CAC to deploy the police to execute the directive against those who fail to register their business by July 7.

Fasasi Sarafadeen Atanda, chairman, AMMBAN, said that inconsistent policies in the fintech space had led to loss of jobs in the sector.

According to him, Nigeria currently has over 3.7 million PoS in circulation. However, service providers were only able to deploy 2.7 million, leaving the gap of one million PoS amounting to a loss of about one million jobs in Nigeria.

“We know the implications of most of these policies that are not well thought out and their impacts on the economy generally. “We have lost over 1.5 million jobs in the last one year,” Atanda said.