Payment of goods and services across the country at merchants’ location through Point of Sale (PoS) terminals in June recorded some 16% rise in value hitting N24.8billion, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
This is against N21.4billion recorded in the month of May.
The volume of transactions was also up 19 percent to 1.6 million in June when compared to 1.4 million in May
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that these figures was achieved on 38,000 active terminals, and that 155,000 terminals have been registered with National Central Switch (NCS) being operated by Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) the Payments Terminal Service Aggregator (PTSA) for the industry, while 120,000 terminals have been deployed as at end of June, 2014. These didn’t change over the period under review.
This is coming against the backdrop of preparedness of stakeholders in the e-payment for the nation-wide commencement of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) cashless policy.
Tunde Ogungbade, managing director, Global Accelerex, a PoS terminal services provider, said: “We should expect that Merchant Acquiring Banks will be less bullish about terminal purchase, measuring twice before cutting purchase order to procure POS Terminals. This will be due to the following factors: the excess terminals inventories from previous acquisitions, underutilized terminals deployed at some merchants’ location currently and are considered for redeployment and the unattractive returns on invested capital on POS terminal currently on their books.”
“I expect that there will be some spikes in large acquisition due to the nationwide adoption of the cashless policy in July 2014, though this will also be damped by spillover effects into other states from the two prior cashless milestones i.e. the Lagos cashless pilot and subsequent state extensions. There will be different developments affecting different stakeholders.”
Ogungbade noted that, there will r plausible developments for banks and their merchants as well as public sector. “I foresee the use of POS terminals by banks in untraditional but very innovative ways to help their merchants’ business on a national scale, but not with a goal to go cashless but a result that introduces cashless practices into the merchants’ business. I also believe that some federal government ministries, departments, parastatals and agencies who have been watching this policy evolve would now be well positioned to ride upon the national cashless policy adoption to institutionalize the policy into their organizations to drive revenue collection and reconciliation.”
He further explained that all the plausible developments will not all happen overnight, but nationwide policy will set the stage for it.
Mrs. Regha Onajite, chief executive officer, Electronic Payment Providers Association of Nigeria (EPPAN) said that currently, the sector has over 200, 000 PoS and that they expect a 100% increase with the commencement of the policy nation-wide.
“The motivation for adoption for consumers is the convenience and security, since there is no compulsion to adopt by the way of penalty for at least the next one year. But, hopefully as people begin to align themselves with the benefits of electronic payment we should gradually see a hundred percent increase in the next one year,” she added.