The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said that Nigeria’s transactions in mobile money stands at N5 billion annually.
The Banking The Director, Supervision of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Dipo Fatokun, on Sunday disclosed this while delivering a paper presentation with the theme, ”Cybersecurity: The Need for Standards” at a forum in Lagos.
He said, “It is not correct that we have not made progress in mobile money. It is right that our expectations on mobile money has not fully been met and probably because we were very ambitious in setting the target.”
The Director said that the mobile money space which started in the country about two years ago with 21 mobile money operators had not met the CBN’s target and stated that the slow growth was due to lack of agency.
“For mobile money to be successful, you must have agent. The CBN did report setting up some conditions on agency banking which the mobile money operators are keying into,” he said.
“We have also released a guideline on super agent structure. We expect that some of the telcos, if not all, will serve as super agents. Two of the telecom companies already have our approval in principle, to make their agents available for mobile money”.
He said most of the mobile money transactions are from subscription payment, and remittance from bank customers.
Fatokun also talked about the issue of fraud saying, ”We are, no doubt, aware that reviews to IT standards for the Nigerian financial industry have accommodated cyber security as a new scope to address the cybercrime challenge of banks.
He said the assessment of electronic transactions in e-payment on the increase. However, he said the value and volume of fraud, though globally is on the increase, but in Nigeria is on decrease because of so many controls in place.
”The truth is that Nigeria is not doing badly, when it comes to cyber fraud and e-banking,” he said.
The CBN boss warned that customers should always be careful about how they speak about their banks.
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