Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has intensified its effort in creating awareness on its cashless policy. Since inception of the policy in 2012, it has recorded over 2000 percent, the CBN says.
The apex bank also says that transactions on the point of sales (POS) terminals have jumped to N50 billion on a monthly basis.
“The number, volume and values of transactions that are carried out on POS terminals have increased. Transactions on POS terminals have gone up to N50 billion on a monthly basis, and that is huge. It is a massive jump from where we started,” Chidi Umeano, deputy director/head, share services, CBN, says at the opening ceremony of a three-day CBN Card Expo Africa in Lagos, with the theme: Retail payment and eCommerce.
According to Umeano, since the cashless initiative took off in 2012, the numbers must have jumped by over 2000 percent, as “I can safely say that there is an increase and adoption of alternative cash, which is what we are preaching, cashless.”
Speaking on the challenges of e-payment, Umeano says that there are a lot of challenges as would be expected, saying the key thing is finding alternative ways of solving the problems.
He identifies infrastructure as a challenge, which Nigeria cannot run away from, noting that it was difficult in a place like Nigeria to achieve internet penetration massively the way it would be needed.
In his words: “We have also tried to migrate to other forms that may not necessarily require internet connectivity. We try to develop a lot of applications around GPRS technology; we’ve tried to have what is called agent banking. All these things we do are to manage the infrastructure we have and the things that we think that people now use very well, like the telephones.
“I am sure you will agree with me that the penetration of telephones is much higher compared to the internet. So, we are trying to develop products that move away from internet and heading towards telephone. So, we do a lot of banking, money transfers and payments using the telephones.”
Adeyinka Adeyemi, managing director, Intermarc Consulting, says the CBN is doing a lot with its cashless policy by a way of creating enabling environment.
According to Adeyinka, the technology to do retail payment and eCommerce in Nigeria is available, that there are a lot of platforms people can use for online transactions today. What is missing here is the mentality and orientation of Nigerians, he says, as “electronic commerce transaction is really going into the future.
“You will be amazed at the opportunities that spring up immediately. You still have your shop wherever you have it, but then you are promoting your business online, globally. That’s on one hand. On the other hand, we are saying that the millennia, the next generation of Nigerians, from what we have seen, will continue to live online. Today, they are doing social network stuff, tomorrow it will be real business-trading, commerce.”
In a recent study recently conducted in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa by Ipsos, a global market research company, on behalf of PayPal, it was discovered that 89 percent of Nigerian internet users shop online or expect to do so in the future. E-commerce has been tipped to champion this drive of economic surge.
