Mobile money transfers in Nigeria rose 344.1 percent over a 10-month period (January-October 2019), a BusinessDay analysis shows.
The volume of transactions (transfers) via mobile devices rose to 26.2 million in the first 10 months of 2019 from 5.9 million in the same period last year, according to data obtained from the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS).
Also, the value of mobile transfers rose 137.4 percent from N238.2 billion in 2018 to N565.4 billion as at October 2019.
According to Ayodele Akinwunmi, corporate banking department, FSDH Merchant Bank Limited, this shows that there is an increased adaptation of technology to drive payments and financial transactions in Nigeria, which is more to reach the unbanked people.
“We now have technology making businesses better and easier. It is also in line with the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) plan to drive financial inclusion in the country. The use of mobile phones by people in the rural areas and urban cities to make transactions, improvement in internet services across the country and data availability has actually increase investments in those areas to ensure that we have a reliable telecommunication system to support the banks payment systems.
“And again CBN has also licensed other operators in the industry to aid this. So convenience for the consumers and the efficiency in driving down the cost price of the operators make this possible,” Akinwunmi said.
Correspondingly, from the NIBSS data, the volume of cheque transactions fell by 13.2 percent to 6.6 million from 7.6 million over the same period.
Omotola Abimbola, a macro and fixed-income analyst at Lagos-based Chapel Hill Denham, said, “This is positive for the economy in terms of efficiency of transactions and velocity of money which is supportive of growth.”
Abimbola also noted that they had clearly been seeing an increase in electronic banking, thinking the spike in e-banking income of banks also corroborated this view and that increased smartphone penetration and technological innovation of banks had greatly supported e-banking services.
Nigerian banks are trying to catch up with their counterparts in other parts of Africa in the provision of online and mobile banking facilities as part of efforts to deepen financial inclusion in Africa’s most populous country. The CBN has set a target of 80 percent inclusion to be achieved by the year 2020.
Stephen Nejo, a banker, told BusinessDay that banks had cut the cost per a mobile money transaction to N52.50 per transfer, down from N100. He explained that this was based on an agreement by the banks and CBN’s acceptance.
