Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for choosing FirstBank’s products and services.
In line with the CBN directive on the Nigerian Uniform Bank Account Number (NUBAN), your account number has changed as indicated below, this is firstbank message to a friend, can they change his account number and issued a new one to him?

Why is this being done?

This is the practice in advanced economies. They have to be uniform. It makes payment processing and other transaction operations easier. Especially in these days of online and over-the-phone transactions.

In the UK, all account numbers are 8-digit numbers. And, no exceptions - big or small financial institutions

As a programmer, it doesn't strike me as necessary. Computers can handle variable-length numbers perfectly. They could just have appended a 'bank code' to each existing number. For example, GTBank account number 477878352 could become GT-477878352 and First Bank account number 62726 would become FB-62726. Any idea why that option wasn't picked? (I bet they considered it).

Just an example of its benefits (not major, though):

A typical recruitment/employee registration form in the UK does not have to have 16/20 columns for different bank accounts. The standard is 8.

Also, it reduces errors: take for instance an over-the-phone transaction, it helps because the moment you start giving more than 8 numbers (or less), the answering machine can easily tell you something is wrong.

There are many other benefits, I think. And, I think they are doing this as the CBN intends to encourage a reduced cash-transaction economy; something I don't think Nigeria is developed/sensitized/educated enough to adopt, though.

Also, in the UK, all bank accounts have what they call "sort code".


These are 6-digit numbers.



Bank account: 8 digits.

Sort Code: 6 digits.

I don't think the minor benefits you mentioned are significant compared to the inconvenience of having to reprogram every IT system in the banking sector to accommodate the new numbers and to update all documents in the country that reference the old account numbers. 

Can you imaging the FRSC boss directing every car owner in the country to change their plate number to a uniform numbering scheme, just to make some minor things a little bit easier? How would you react to that? Or GEJ changing our official language to French?

^^This site explains the main reason for this NUBAN. I thing it is an ECOWAS directive:

The 10-digit NUBAN would make Nigeria fully compliant with the 10-digit Account Number structure required by the West Africa Monetary Institute towards the economic integration of ECOWAS countries (a similar scheme is also the practiced in the United Kingdom)
- Why do I need a NUBAN account number?
There are many advantages of the NUBAN account system. Your 10-digit account number is convenient, simple and can easily be managed.
NUBAN frees you from the risk of quoting account numbers wrongly – a risk that is higher with account numbers of longer digits.
It makes it easy for banks to validate customer accounts It is aimed at facilitating easier and faster handling of e-payments

http://universalconsults.lefora.com/2011/05/15/introduction-of-a-10-digit-account-numbering-syste/

@seun, ur drawn analysis comparing the case of the nuban acccount with plate numbers and GEJ is quite unfounded.

[s]
@Seun :
u mean u dont bank, or use one of those slow banks?

Just kidding.

Banks like gtb and zenith have complied since may, and their customers have forgotten about it.

They just mapped the new nuban to the old numbers. You can pay in with both for now, but online banking logon and similar based on the old numbers retain login parameters.

Once u login, u c d old as internal ref number and can xfer using either.

Point is, migration was a no brainer really. Just additional fields to oracle forms or whatever.

Lolz.
[/s]

Thread Closed

I hv been asked abt dis oooo still confused. I tot our account numbers hv already bin changed to 10-digits. Ar dy trying to gv us a 10-digit unique number as our account number irrespective of our bank?