PoS transactions in Nigeria surge 20.5% in 11 months

The eleven-month data available on the Nigeria inter-bank settlement scheme (NIBSS) shows that the volume of Point of sale (PoS) increased by 20.5 percent to 1.06 trillion from 883 million recorded in the same period of 2021.

However, in value, it recorded a 32 percent increase from N7.56 trillion as of November 2022, compared to N5.73 trillion in the same period of 2021.

The new cash withdrawal limit of N20, 000 daily from the PoS channel, effective from January 9, 2023, has been described as a threat to the sales and profits of operators, BusinessDay reported.

Chinedu Onuoha, chief executive officer at Mzuri said value may drop, but volume will increase not just at the end of this month but beyond, but most importantly because of the limited cash availability.

“Another factor we have to take into account is the minimum wage in Nigeria is still 30,000 a month. Not a lot of Nigerians have cash balances and cash needs that exceed the new thresholds. On balance, I still see an upward increase in the volume of transactions done at agent locations,” he said.

According to him, customers with large ticket withdrawals will have to look for alternative channels or embark on transaction splitting across multiple banks. In this case, a single individual may resort to having cards across multiple banks.

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In 11 months, the data also revealed PoS banking agents increased to 12.7 million, while registration increased to 20.9 million which was deployed from January-November 2022, from 11.4 that was recorded in 2021.

In the same vein, mobile transactions also saw a 146 percent increase, in the eleven-month of 2022 to N16.9 trillion from N6.87 trillion in the corresponding period of 2021.

While, its volume surged to 609 million from 249 million in the corresponding period, accounting for a 144.7 percent increase.

NIBSS ‘Instant Payments – 2020 Annual Statistics’ report. disclosed that mobile is driving electronic payments in the nation. Accounting for 43 percent of total transactions in 2020, while 35 percent of transactions were with USSD, indicating 78 percent of total transfer transactions were carried out using mobile devices.

Also, in terms of Nigeria’s instant payment (NIP), its volume of transactions saw a 4.08 billion rise in the eleven-month period of 2022, from 3.08 billion in 2021.

Following the same trend, its value rose to N310.5 trillion from N241.7 trillion in the period in which it occurred.

Correspondingly, from the NIBSS data, the volume of cheque transactions fell by 8.1 percent to 3.73 million from 4.06 million recorded between the eleven-month period of 2022 and 2021.

The volume of cheques cleared by Nigerian banks keeps decreasing as banks and financial technology companies continue to introduce faster and easier means of making payments.

Currently, customers can easily make transfers of huge amounts of money without requesting cheques, said Gloria Fadipe, head of research at FCMB.

Onuoha added that other electronic channels such as mobile, NIP, USSD code, etc will witness an upswing, however, cheques will not be able to compete in this new world of instant value.

“Trust is another issue that is working against cheque,” he said.