Customers, Bank Errors Move Failed PoS Payments To 19%

Nigerians continue to experience declined transactions on Point of Sales terminals all over the country as failed PoS transactions hit 256,228 on Monday evening.

Live transaction updates obtained from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System showed that payment on the PoS terminals had a high failure rate of 18.9 per cent out of a total of 1,354,658 transactions conducted as of 9.35pm.

According to the data, the customers contributed the most to the failure of the transactions as 136,834 of the failed transactions were attributed to errors they committed.

The statistics indicated that 68,874 errors emanated from the issuer bank and 46,147 errors, which originated from the acquirer bank. This also contributed significantly to the failed funds transfer carried out by retailers and merchants across the country.

However, the updates showed that the NIBSS platform and security breach had not in any way contributed to the unsuccessful payments while the processors errors contributed minimally at 0.27 per cent.

NIBSS, in April, said measures had been taken to ensure efficiency in the electronic payment system and achieve shorter transaction time.

The acting Managing Director, NIBSS, Mr Niyi Ajao, had said, “The total turn-around-time had been configured at 15 seconds in agreement with banks and processors. However, delayed responses from issuers after this timeout in recent times could cause authorised debits not to return to the terminal before the set TAT.”