CBN, Firm Sign $50m Banking Biometric Capture Deal

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Dermalog BMS, a German company, have signed a $50 million Banking Industry Biometric Solutions Project  in furtherance of the regulator’s bid to achieve more reliable, technology-driven, fraud-free banking services delivery in the country.

According to the agreement, the first phase of the project would connect the Central Data point to at least one branch of each bank, the CBN and the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) within 90 days.

This will be followed by the second phase, which will ensure full capture of biometric details of all bank customers nationwide within 12 months.

The project is expected to provide a centralised platform through which banks may enroll and uniquely verify the identity of each customer for ‘know your customer’ (KYC) purposes, perform credit checks, verify customer’s integrity and to authenticate customers from a point of transaction device.

Speaking on the project and its importance to efforts targeted at curbing the increasing incidents of compromise on conventional security systems in the industry,  Lamido Sanusi, CBN Governor, said the project represented a major landmark in the Bankers Committee’s efforts at promoting financial inclusion drive, expanding banking services, access to credit and more importantly, dealing with money laundering and other problems that the industry is still contending with.

He explained that the CBN and the banks decided to embark on the project as a proactive strategy to enhance the integrity of banking services delivery by building a reliable customer identification system which, he said, would help in complementing the other projects being embarked upon by various government agencies, including the National Identity Card project, to build a single identification database for all Nigerians.

Sanusi said the scope of the project goes beyond the banking sector customers and has implications for those in micro finance banks, pension funds, insurance companies, stock market investors and dealers, amongst others. He said when operational, the project would help create a credible national image for Nigeria globally, deal with money laundering and other frauds and  help the banks to extend credit to people without worrying about where to find them and who they are.

He explained: “We took a decision almost two years ago that it is not wise to continue waiting for the bigger projects to happen and we have to, as it were, take our own destinies into our own hands and start our own KYC and an identification data base. We set up a Committee chaired by the Group Managing Director of Zenith Bank with membership from Access, First Bank, UBA and Skye Bank CEOs were part of that committee.