Mobile Money Transactions Hit N8m Daily

Some N8 million are exchanged daily by mobile money schemes in the country, underscoring the growing acceptance of the scheme after a lethargic take off, according to findings by Nigeria CommunicationsWeek.

Transactions among mobile money schemes commenced in March this year after the expiration of the February 28 deadline of by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to operators to connect to National Central Switch (NCS) that is offering the handshake.

The handshake otherwise interoperability is basically the ability of the user of one mobile money service to send money directly to the wallet of a user on any other service.

Without interoperability the difficult decision of which mobile money service to choose might be influenced by which members of the customer’s peer group are already using a given service.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that the daily transactions value of N8 million is carried out in over 200 transactions every day.

These are specifically transactions from one mobile scheme wallet to another as well as from mobile scheme wallet to bank accounts.

But transactions within a mobile scheme are not recorded in this value and volume as their transactions are not routed through NCS.

Emmanuel Okoegwale, principal associate, MobileMoneyAfrica, said there are different levels to achieve interoperability. It could be platform, agency or even via other channels like merchants.

“Essentially interoperability enables the acceptance of e-money seamlessly across providers, agency network and event merchants. Interoperability for agent revolves around agents’ ability to meet the needs of subscribers across multiple providers for cash out and cash in service, same way ATMs don’t discriminate between cards of firms that had entered into interoperability agreements at National or even at international level. It significantly reduces the cost for ecosystem players across agency network,” he said.

Okoegwale added that when interoperability is achieved in the system a subscriber of scheme provider A, can send mobile money from his wallet to subscriber that is enrolled in scheme provider B and the funds in the wallet can be spent directly at a merchant location or cash out at own agent locations.

It would be recalled that Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had issued licences to 16 companies to operator mobile money transactions.

The CBN had said that the MMOs were licensed to accelerate the transformation of the nation’s payment system which would emphasis use of mobile phones.

Mr. Chalapathi Rao Immidi, director and head, Global Business Development, Mfino, said interoperability was needed for providers to share their infrastructure networks, thereby enabling multiple allowances, without which the economy would not grow.

“Imagine all of us not being able to talk to people not on our mobile network, because they are on other networks,” he said.


Rao Immidi said providers would have to operate in unison to make the adoption of mobile money easier.

“This will enable many factors and many people and organizations and banks will be encouraged to participate and there will be more range of products to offer customers,” he said.

According to him, mobile money has a lot to offer apart from the basic sending and receiving of money, as it can be used for government disbursement, salary payment, settling of daily paid workers and more.