E-Financial
Demystifying the ATM Customer Experience in Nigeria

The ATM in Nigeria has gone from a mysterious machine of very high distrust to a basic essential. Understandably, being at the perceived epicentre of online fraud and Internet scams has made Nigerians exceedingly weary of this machine which spits cash at the punch of just four digits.
My personal take though, is that there exist more advanced hacking centres outside of Nigeria.
Common knowledge seems to suggest that parts of Eastern Europe and Asia top Nigeria by a country mile.
My wife and many others like her, who have vowed never to test the efficacy of the banks’ assurances on the safety and security of their ATM systems against the increasing ingenuity of fraudsters have now become unwilling converts due to the higher risk of being unceremoniously shut out of modern day transactions.
Regulatory pressures a-la the Cashless Nigeria initiative by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have also played their part in this conspiracy against the conservatives.
Hefty penalties have now being instituted on cash transactions beyond a certain threshold. Thankfully, she has broken ranks and acquired an ATM card just only last year.
The CBN has tried to allay the fears of Nigerians by enforcing on the banks additional security measures such as the installation of anti-skimming devices, and two camera systems on all ATMs.
The rational being that a fraudster who covers both cameras with his hands to avoid detection will have no spare to conduct his nefarious activities.
The average customer experience of the ATM user in Nigeria is still a tale of woes, mostly self-inflicted, and inadvertently by the same banks in whose major interest it should be to drive adoption to cut the relatively high cost of serving customers within the branch.
Two very glaring examples; it is reported that on the eve of Christmas last year, customers looking for ATMs to withdraw cash for their festivities in the Gbagada area found to their dismay after visiting many ATMs and being greeted with the now familiar ‘temporary out of service’ or ‘Unable to dispense Cash’ messages, that the only ATMs that seemed to be working on the whole axis were the UBA ATMs at the Charlie Boy Bus stop.
Of course the queue had built up to the extent that faint hearted customers rather opted to go without cash than risk the possible consequences of a stampede. Similarly, on December 14, 2013 there were reports that virtually no ATM was working in the Badagry area.
These experiences are exacerbated majorly by the following factors; firstly, stagnation in the ATM population in spite of significant adoption rate by Nigerians.
The ATM population in Nigeria has been stuck at the 11,000 mark for the past six years, resulting in an average of 11.39 ATMs per 100k adult population (adult population in Nigeria being about 56% or 95.2m according to a World Bank report on population).
This is not unconnected to the Central Bank’s misadventure with the Independent ATM Deployers (IAD) experiment of 2008 that barred banks from deploying ATMs outside their branches. This resulted in the abrupt halt in the momentum of ATM deployment by Banks.
This was largely due to the hasty conduct of the CBN in trying to swallow an elephant at one go. Noble as the intention was, a pilot scheme would have uncovered the soft underbelly of the strategy, the major shortcoming being the fact that the cash in the offsite ATMs would have been too expensive for the IADs to carry, and therefore compel them to charge customers very exorbitant rates or render them totally unprofitable at the flat rate of N100 per withdrawal, then allowed by the CBN.
Six years later we have less than the 11,800 achieved at the highpoint, because many banks had to abandon the long term rents secured for their offsite ATMs and wheeled the ATMs into warehouses and parking lots because the IADs could not afford the book value to take on the sites and ATMs.
The operational lives of those ATMs, about a third of the total volume were cut short, as they were subsequently unusable two years later when the CBN rescinded her decision.
Comparatively, Indonesia with an adult population of about 90m, more than doubled their ATM installed base from 16.7k in 2011 to 36.5k in 2012, resulting in 37 ATMs per 100k adult population, about three time the ATM per adult capita in Nigeria.
South Africa has 60 ATMs per 100k adult population, while the UK has 124 ATMs per 100k adult population. Nigeria clearly has a lot to do as the largest economy in Africa.
Secondly, the quality of notes in the ATM are a far cry from standard. In the early days, the ATM was where to go if you wanted crisp notes.
Today, the notes in the ATM are sometimes worse that the change you receive at the flea market. This is underscored by the fact that the security features and the general quality of the naira could do with some enhancements.
Dirty notes generally cause paper dirt to be lodged in sensitive parts of the ATM when it is dispensing cash, therefore resulting in more frequent system faults or currency jams.
A telling revelation when we compare the work rate of the ATM in Nigeria to say the UK is that the Nigerian ATM has to dispense on the average five notes to one in the UK, if it is dispensing N1,000 notes and the UK one is dispensing £20 notes (£20 is approximately N5,000).
This coupled with the low ATM density and challenged note quality contributes a lot to the frequent breakdowns and ‘unable to dispense cash’ notices.
Thirdly and very importantly, most ATMs in Nigeria are not under any guaranteed service level support program.
This is very shocking, and a serious anomaly by any stretch of the imagination. Banks inadvertently encourage this malaise.
There is a notion that appraisal and compensation for ATM support heads in the E-banking departments seem to be heavily skewed on how much they can save in the ATM support costs.
So they devise all means necessary to achieve this, even at the detriment of customer experience and the banks’ brand erosion.
There is a blatant refusal to sign any Service Level Agreements (SLA) support for the ATMs in the first year of purchase under the illusion that warranty on the systems equates to SLA support.
This results in fallacious claims of reduction in support costs.
This alluded cost efficiency cannot be further from the truth. Warranty and SLA support are quite different from each other as any owner of a car under warranty well knows.
While SLA defines the time within which an ATM should be fixed or replaced in the event of a fault (usually two hours within urban areas and six hours in remote areas), warranty relies on a best effort basis for the replacement of factory defective parts.
Parts that are rendered unusable due to wear and tear, or as a result of exogenous effects such as power surges cannot be claimed under warranty (as sometimes the bank officials are wont to ferociously argue). For simplicity, warranty on ATMs is very similar to that on automobiles.
If you drive your new car which carries a three year or 100,000km warranty to the dealer for a part replacement. Firstly they check that it is not normal wear and tear, and that it is not due to abnormal circumstances such as the wrong type of fuel or an accident.
Then they take in the car and order the part. They call you when the part arrives, which takes an average of three months, and then slap you with a labour bill.
This is the type of service that the Bank is hoodwinked to render to their hapless customers. It is worthy to note that warranty does not cover periodic maintenance of the machines. Imagine driving your warranty car for three years straight or 100,000km without any service or Oil change!
Not opting even for the bare bones labour-only quarterly preventive maintenance service does drastically shorten the lifespan of the ATMs
It is therefore not surprising that some relatively new ATMs needlessly break down and cause customers to spend eternity looking for a working one, or in an endless queue.
The average annual support spend on an ATM in Nigeria is $2,500, about half of what obtains in Indonesia and South Africa, both spending about $4,500 per ATM per annum.
By investing the right amount to keep their systems properly maintained, they prolong the lives of their ATMs and ensure better customer experiences, which we readily testify to when we visit those countries.
Thirdly, we now know that most ATMs work with the windows operating system. Many are currently on the windows XP platform which has recently been announced by Microsoft as de-supported, and a new operating system, windows 7, announced to replace it.
This means that any ATM that is not upgraded to the windows 7 operating system shall be vulnerable to viruses and fraud attacks, since the new security patches shall not work on them.
Worldwide, 2.2m ATMs are vulnerable. In Nigeria a significant number of the installed base shall be affected. The solution is a simple upgrade of the operating system if the ATM is upgradable.
This is free if the bank has been paying their software maintenance fee. They will otherwise have to incur huge capital costs to repurchase the new software licenses.
Available data suggests that many banks have not kept up with the software support fees. A further complication is that certain category of ATMs cannot be upgraded because of non USB Interfaces. These have to be replaced, and will further deplete the already stretched ATM density.
Lastly, there are serious challenges in stable and consistent power supply, and network connectivity, both of which the ATM cannot operate without.
There are also infrastructure challenges in access roads to ATMs in rural areas which cause support engineers to spend significantly more ‘travel time’ than ‘dwell time’ to fix machines.
A possible solution will be for service providers to have enough support offices across the country than depend on engineers being dispatched only from the three commercial centers of Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja. Cross training support engineers on ATMs, inverters and network connectivity will ensure that the first engineer to arrive at the ATM can fix the fault and does not have to call another specialist.
A monitoring system if installed by the provider would ensure that the ATM correctly diagnoses itself and advices on the correct spare part to be carried to site.
A monitoring system will however, require client licenses on the ATMs for which maintenance fees are due to be paid, and which many banks shy away from.
Banks are by no means the only clog in the wheel of good ATM customer experience. Some of the blame lie squarely on the shoulders of the service providers.
In a bid to win business at all costs they are ready to accept terms that tempt them to cut corners in quality of products and service delivery.
For example, there is a need to install monitoring systems and a call centre to aid support efficacy.
There is also a need to ensure that the custodians are sufficiently trained to provide the crucial first level support.
The negligence of these will make the support process expensive, unwieldy and ineffective. This drives the proverbial ‘race to the bottom’ for all stakeholders.
A decimation in the number of service providers or their replacement by uncertified operators willing to collect the cutthroat rates offered by the banks will not bode any good tidings for the banks nor their customers.
Another emerging class in the clog of ATM availability is the gang of Marauders who attempt to blow-up the ATMs to gain access to the cash in the safes.
For this group, Banknote staining could be an effective prevention technique, in which the anticipated reward of the crime is removed by denying the benefits, by marking the cash stolen with special security ink. Of course the ink should be machine detectable to ensure that deposit machines reject stained notes.
Surprisingly, some customers are also culpable. Furiously banging the ATM when ‘it swallows your card’ or does not dispense the money on your transaction will not solve any problem.
If anything at all, it will only compound the problem by taking that ATM out of service. In the rare instance of this anomaly, the right thing to do is to call the number on the ATM body or visit the bank.
There are usually journal entries and time stamps that will prove that you were not paid what you have been inadvertently debited, and a routine for redress and refund instituted.
While acknowledging the significant progress that we have recorded in payment systems, underpinned by the opportunity for the average Nigerian to be availed of having access to the global installed base of ATMs, courtesy of his local bank ATM card, and without recourse to a foreign bank account and ATM card, there is still the need to ensure that charity truly begins at home.
The above is not intended as an exercise in ATM service indictments, but rather a discourse that will help in the appreciation, and management of the root cause of the below average ATM customer experience in Nigeria from which we are all groaning.
Okere is Group CEO, CWG PLC & Entrepreneur in Residence, CBS
E-Financial
CBN, SEC Fine Access Holdings N1.21Bn for Infractions

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have jointly imposed a total fine of ₦1.21bn on Access Holdings Plc for a series of regulatory breaches committed during the 2024 financial year.
The move reflects a more assertive regulatory approach by the country’s financial watchdogs, aimed at reinforcing discipline and aligning Nigeria’s banking standards with global best practices.
According to the group’s audited financial statements submitted to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX), the fines represent a sharp increase of over 217 per cent compared to the ₦38m penalty issued during the same period in 2023.
This significant rise in sanctions signals a new era of stricter enforcement and zero tolerance for non-compliance within the banking sector.
Access Holdings was penalised by the CBN for multiple contraventions, including failures related to anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, poor reporting of cybersecurity incidents, the unauthorized warehousing of government funds, and violations of consumer protection standards.
One of the most substantial penalties was a ₦718.5m fine imposed for breaches of AML regulations.
The central bank also issued a ₦300m fine for the improper warehousing of funds belonging to a government agency, which constituted a serious lapse in financial governance.
Further sanctions were issued for the group’s failure to properly report cyber incidents, resulting in a ₦69m fine, while additional penalties were imposed for breaches related to targeted financial sanctions and ineffective screening solutions within the bank’s systems.
The group got the sum of N10m penalty for contravention of regulations on targeted financial sanctions and screening solutions relating to the Bank’s database and ₦2m for wrongful renewal of debit cards, which violated consumer protection guidelines.
The financial institution was also penalised ₦5m for non-compliance with regulations related to mystery shopping exercises involving confiscated naira notes,
The SEC, on its part, sanctioned Access Holdings with a ₦100.6m fine for the unauthorized sale of securities, a serious infraction that undermines the integrity of Nigeria’s capital market.
This particular violation highlights concerns around operational transparency and internal controls within the bank’s investment services.
Regulatory authorities have emphasized that these enforcement actions are not isolated but part of a broader commitment to strengthen financial supervision across Nigeria’s banking and capital markets.
Under the leadership of Olayemi Cardoso, governor, CBN, the central bank has prioritized reforms that promote financial stability, strengthen institutional compliance, and reduce the risk of systemic failures.
The focus on anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) has become particularly pronounced, reflecting both domestic priorities and Nigeria’s obligations under international financial agreements.
The SEC, similarly, has reaffirmed its dedication to maintaining order in the capital markets and ensuring that all participants adhere to existing rules and ethical standards.
Both agencies have adopted a proactive stance in recent years, intensifying oversight mechanisms and increasing the frequency of audits and inspections to deter infractions before they escalate.
The fines imposed on Access Holdings underscore the seriousness with which regulators now view non-compliance.
As the financial landscape evolves and becomes increasingly digitized, institutions are being held to higher standards of accountability, operational integrity, and consumer protection.
The CBN and SEC have made it clear that ensuring a sound, transparent, and globally competitive financial system is a top priority—and enforcement actions such as these are central to achieving that goal.
E-Financial
First Asset Management Launches N100 Billion Infrastructure Fund to Provide Sustainable Capital for Infrastructural Development Across Sectors

In a strategic move to address Nigeria’s infrastructure financing gap, First Asset Management, one of Nigeria’s leading investment managers and a subsidiary of First HoldCo Plc., has officially launched the N20 billion Series 1 Offer under its N100bn FBN Infrastructure Fund Programme.
This groundbreaking initiative reflects the firm’s dedication to support critical infrastructure development through long-term investment strategies tailored to Nigeria’s unique needs.
The Fund is designed to provide sustainable capital for large-scale projects across key sectors, including renewable energy, power, recycling, waste management, and water resource development.
These sectors are critical to economic transformation, environmental sustainability, and fostering social impact. The launch marks a significant milestone in First Asset Management’s mission to enhance Nigeria’s capital markets by offering investors robust alternative investment opportunities.
Mr. Ike Onyia, Managing Director of First Asset Management, emphasized that the infrastructure fund underscores the company’s strategic focus on contributing to national development through innovative financial instruments. “This launch represents a bold step forward in actualising our promise to support transformative projects that unlock economic potential, empower communities, and align with the global drive towards sustainable finance,” he stated.
Mr. Onyia further affirmed that the Fund would facilitate private and public sector collaboration on capital-intensive projects that will create jobs, enhance social welfare, and improve Nigeria’s environmental outlook through a strong focus on ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles.
The Series 1 Issuance offers a tenor of ten years and a minimum investment of N10,000,000.00, targeting qualified investors seeking long-term returns. The Fund is structured to provide stable income derived from infrastructure projects domiciled in Nigeria, with investments denominated in Naira.
It is tailored to attract pension funds, development finance institutions, institutional and professional investors, as well as high-net-worth individuals who are eager to contribute to infrastructure growth while achieving substantial financial returns.
In addition to offering a strong financial proposition, the Fund aims to directly support Nigeria’s development priorities by financing projects that create employment, enhance productivity, mitigates pollution, and improve the quality of life across communities.
By adopting a sustainable and impact-driven approach to investing, First Asset Management is setting the tone for a new era of development aimed at capital mobilisation in Nigeria.
First Asset Management Limited reaffirms its position as a catalyst for progress in the Nigerian financial ecosystem. Through initiatives like the FBN Infrastructure Fund, the firm remains dedicated in its commitment to delivering innovative solutions, building investor confidence, and contributing to the nation’s enduring growth trajectory.
E-Financial
Access Bank Faces Charges over Alleged Diversion of N826m

Access Bank Plc and one of its employees are enmeshed in legal troubles after a four-count charge was filed against them at the Federal High Court over the alleged diversion of N825.9 million in state funds into a fraudulent account.
According to Premium Times, the e charges, filed by the federal government, followed an investigation by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC).
The charges, filed at the Sokoto Judicial Division, accused Abdulmalik Abubakar, a relationship manager at Access Bank’s Sokoto branch, and the bank itself of conspiracy, money laundering, and concealment of stolen funds.
The state counsel in count one alleged that the defendants created a fake “Internal Revenue Service Account” with number 1873016763, through which they received N825.9 million between May 2024 and January 2025, in violation of Nigeria’s Money Laundering Act of 2022 and the Corrupt Practices Act of 2000.
The second count accuses them of allegedly concealing the same funds through the same fraudulent account, said to have been created at Access Bank’s Sokoto branch.
According to the court, the bank and Abubakar committed an offence contrary to section 18 (2)(a) and punishable under sections 18(3), 18 (4), 22(1) and 22(2) of the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022.
In count three, prosecutors say the money was fraudulently received through the fake account, “thereby committing an offence contrary to section 13 and punishable under section 68 of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000”.
Count four alleges that Abubakar and the bank directly concealed the laundered funds, “thereby committing an offence contrary to and punishable under section 24 of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000”.
The federal government said the money was diverted without authorisation and concealed in breach of anti-corruption and money laundering laws.
According to a hearing notice signed on May 2, the case had been moved from the General Cause List to a hearing set for May 19 (yesterday).
It will be heard on that date if the court’s schedule allows.
Otherwise, it will be postponed without further notice.
The hearing may last up to two days.
The notice said either party wishing to postpone must apply to the court promptly and provide proof if the reason involves factual matters.
At the hearing, both parties must present all evidence, including witnesses and documents.
Evidence must be submitted during the hearing.
Failure to do so may result in exclusion or costs.
It said parties wanting witnesses to attend should immediately request the court to issue summons, allowing enough time to notify them.
If witnesses must bring documents, these must be clearly specified.
The party requesting witnesses must pay reasonable fees for their expenses and loss of time, as fixed by the court.
Attendance may be refused if fees are not deposited.
If either party wishes to use documents held by the other, they must notify them in writing ahead of the hearing.
Otherwise, they cannot present secondary evidence.
The notice was issued by order of the court.
When contacted, Kunle Aderinokun, Access Bank spokesperson, said the bank would issue an official statement on the matter, according to Premium Times.
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