Nigerian CommunicationWeek

CBN Yet to Achieve Interoperability in POS Transactions

Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Gov., CBN

More than a year after Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued a guideline on Point of Sale (PoS) card acceptance services; the sector is yet to achieve interoperability, no thanks to the challenges of cost of upgrading their applications in conformity with National Central Switch (NCS) applications standard.

Interoperability is the ability to issue cards and deploy devices in such a way that all customers (card holders, merchants and issuers) perceive operations, while obtaining service, as if the interconnected networks were one.

To achieve this CBN in the guideline mandated the five licensed Payment Terminal Service Providers (PTSPs) among who are Unified Payment Services, Paymaster, Etop Nigeria, Easyfuel and Citiserve to comply with existing application to National Central Switch which is manage by Nigeria Interbank settlement Systems (NIBSS) – the industry Payments Terminal Service Aggregator by December 1, 2011.

This was to make for seamless connectivity and routing of traffic to various switches.

However, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that some of the old operators in the PoS space are yet to meet the standard specification of applications for terminals thereby making it difficult for such terminal to communicate to NCS directly.

This means that such transactions are carried out through a third party.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that only PTSPs who are new in the business were able to deploy terminal application that conform to the specification by NIBSS because they have to deploy from the scratch while old operators are required to configure their application to desire specification which put huge cost on them and is slowing the process behind CBN December 1, 2011 deadline.

It was learnt that existing PTSPs who were using different application from the one NCS has chosen, will have to carry out a complete network upgrade to the standard of NCS thereby abandoning their former application.

It was further revealed that NIBSS in an effort to resolve the problem of interoperability arising from differences in application for terminals established an application certification laboratory to review existing applications in the industry as well as streamline existing differences to conform to the application specification standard approved by CBN.

It would be recalled that the CBN guideline on POS card acceptance service released in August was part of the apex bank cashless policy designed to encourage Nigeria to make payments and other transactions at merchant locations across the country.

Exit mobile version