The Governor of the Central Bank,
Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, says the apex
bank will partner some satellite system
companies to boost international
telecommunication services in the country by
creating hot spots.
Sanusi, who disclosed this at a meeting with a
World Economic Forum Group in Abuja on
Tuesday, said that the synergy would enhance
implementation of financial inclusion in
Nigeria.
The focus of the meeting was “Promoting
Global Financial Inclusion: Overcoming Key
Barriers through Public–Private Collaboration.’’
Sanusi identified lack of infrastructure as a
major challenge to the implementation of the
policy.
He said that the least expensive way of
deploying products was technology, but said
that the low level of internet penetration
around the country remained a problem.
He also said that excessive reliance on
telephone companies in the country had its
problems “because in this country,
telecommunication companies make a lot of
money from Small Message Service (SMS)”.
“But, the incentives to invest in order to have a
bandwidth are limited unless it has additional
commercial values.
“So, we have to figure out something and for
example, one of the things we have figured out
is to see if we can use some of the satellite
companies to drop internet across the country”.
According to him, the idea is to have internet
services in each of the 774 local government
headquarters in the country and to create hot
spots.
The hot spots, he said, would help to create
internet cafe, mobile agents, Point of Sales
(POS) operations, Automated Teller Machines
(ATM) operation, among others.
The apex bank governor said that financial
inclusion would not be achieved without strong
financial literacy and education to help people
to take decisions on personal financial issues.
On efforts of the bank to ensure financial
inclusion through Cashless policy, he said that
there had been continuous progress with the
policy.
“The simple example is on the POS; we started
with 11,000 terminals in the entire Lagos area
with less than 6,000 active POS terminals and
were doing transactions of N5 million to N10
million per day.
“Today, we have got more than 150 thousand
POS terminals in Lagos; about 20 per cent of
them are active and we are doing between
N1billion and N2.5 billion on POS transactions
daily,’’ he said
Sanusi said that there had been general
reduction in cash transactions in the country
and that banks would strive to harmonise the
Know-Your-Customer (KYC) policy to capture
persons that were excluded in the banking
system.
“A major bottleneck in the phase of financial
inclusion is the identification of customers with
a unique ID; I don’t know what it is in other
countries, but here it is serious,’’ he said.
According to him, without proper identification,
there will be a limit to the amount of money
that can be given to a customer for doing
business.
He said that the CBN would, on February 14,
2014, officially launch the second phase of the
biometric project, adding that the contract had
been awarded and that work on it was ongoing.
He said that the biometric project was to ensure
that every customer of a bank, a micro finance
company or any other financial system, was
captured on a central data-base.
“Once a customer has...
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This would be a welcome Development. Let's watch and see how it unfolds.