The second phase of the cash-less policy billed to commence in July may raise the value of electronic funds transfer in the country to N160 billion per day by the end of this year, the Chief Executive Officer, Electronic Payment Providers Association of Nigeria (E-PPAN), Mrs. Onajite Regha, has said.
Additional states coming on board for the next phase of the cash-less policy are the Federal Capital Territory, Abia, Rivers, Anambra, Kano and Ogun states.
The E-PPAN boss, who spoke in Lagos, said the current value of electronic fund transfers – put at N80 billion per day by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), would most likely double because there would be a lot of changes, which would compel people to use e-Fund transfer channels.
The Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) is handling transactions worth about N20 billion daily, while the Nigeria Electronic Funds Transfer is conducting about N60bn worth of transactions daily.
NIBSS provides the infrastructure for automated processing, settlement of payments and fund transfer instructions between banks, discount houses and card companies in Nigeria. It is owned equally by all licensed banks in Nigeria, and the CBN. Discount houses operating in Nigeria also hold substantial shares.
A NEFT payment is an irrevocable fund transfer instruction.
Mrs. Onajite Regha said : “By the time we do six months into the new phase, the figure is likely going to rise by over 100 per cent.
“All these places we are going to are places where cash is moved heavily. We are looking at six additional commercial centres. We should, therefore, not forget that right now, it is only Lagos that is functional.”
Currently, there about 150,000 PoS terminals deployed in the country for the cash-less initiative, which commenced in January last year.
The E-PPAN boss said: “By the time we started the Cash-less Lagos scheme, the projection of the regulator was that by December, 2012, we would have recorded 40,000 PoS terminal deployment. But available data showed that we now have about 150, 000 PoS machines in Lagos.
“However, the question is: How many of the PoS are working? So, that is where I believe we need to work on. We need to have better connectivity to these terminals to encourage the merchants and the consumers to use the devices for seamless payment transactions.”
The Deputy Governor, Operations, CBN, Mr. Tunde Lemo, who is responsible for driving the cash-less policy, recently explained that the additional states (Rivers, Kano, Anambra, Ogun and Abia as well as the FCT) for the cash-less initiative were chosen because of the large volume of cash transactions in some of their major cities.
He said: “Recall that we started this programme actually in January last year and we are only just continuing. We are only just moving to phase two, so we have learnt all the ropes in phase one in cash-less Lagos and we believe we are ready to roll out to other six locations in Nigeria”.
