The electronic payment landscape in Nigeria has continued to be on the ascendancy as the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) has conducted over 14 million transactions between November 2012 to October 2013 valued at over N9.3 trillion, recording impressive growth since the last 12 months.
This was revealed last week by Mrs. Christabel Onyejekwe, Executive Director, Business Development, NIBSS Plc while making a presentation on Cashless Nigeria initiative at the fourth annual payments systems and fraud conference organised by the Electronic Payment Providers Association of Nigeria and Central Bank of Nigeria in Lagos to ensure secure payments.
According to her, point of sale machines (PoS) monthly volumes moved from an average volume of 120,000 in 2013 to an average of 640,000 monthly volume.
The volume of PoS transaction moved up from 407,000 in November 2013 to 1.063 million as at October 2013 while the value of transactions also moved from N7.61 billion to N17.84 billion as at October 2013.
“In the last two months, NIBSS embarked on a data clean-up exercise of duplicate and idle PoS terminals on our database and at merchant locations.
The purpose was to harmonise PTSA Industry Statistics in view of the deployment of new PoS terminals to other cashless locations”, she said.
NIBSS Central Terminal Management System offers avenue for payment terminal transaction monitoring with steady growth in number of deployed terminals.
Active terminals 31,222 estimated at 28 per cent of PoS deployed. Meanwhile there are 158.431 registered PoS while deployed and connected PoS stands at 115, 475 as at October 31, 2013.
Out of top 15 regions where cashless has taken deep root, Lagos, Abuja, Ogun, Abia and Kano are the top five regions accounting for 91 per cent of the entire PoS transactions in the country with Lagos representing 72 per cent share.
This shows the ample opportunity for PoS adoption in key states of the economy.
Deputy Governor, Operations, CBN, Tunde Lemo in his presentation said the cashless train has left the station and Nigeria was making reasonable progress within the context of the peculiarity of its environment.
“May I express my appreciation to you stakeholders for your cooperation without which we could not have gone far.
“The infrastructural challenges are being tackled head on while government reforms in both power and telecommunication sectors will ensure long term sustainability. However, the menace of fraud threat has assumed a frightening dimension globally overtaking drug trafficking as the largest revenue earning organised crime in the world.
Lemo said “It is time we started making necessary investment in enhancing capacity and building a sufficient pool of experts within the industry to lead efforts in evolving countermeasures and risk management framework.
We also do not expect to grow volumes without commensurate engagement of requisite skills in terms of quality and quantity to prevent and manage potential incidences”.
