Financial inclusion initiative of central bank of Nigeria, CBN, will receive a boost next month as agent banking units under the initiative will begin to enjoy interoperability, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.
Ronke Kuye, managing director, Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility, SANEF, disclosed this on the side line at Inlaks digital summit last week. She said that interoperability has posed a major challenge for agents under the SANEF programme as agents are unable to open any bank account for customers from one unit.
“By November this year banking agents under SANEF programme will begin to open accounts and make transactions in all the banks from a single unit. By then we would have achieved interoperability,” she said.
She also expressed the need for collaboration among stakeholders in the financial services delivery especially in the area of financial literacy.
A player in that space, Fasasi Sarafadeen Atanda, managing director, Ecosystem Hybrid Network, described interoperability as open banking that allows customers at agent banking location to be able to access banking facility of any of their choice of brand bank at a single agent unit.
“Achieving interoperability at agency banking level is a welcome development and there are a lot of services that we need to have with interoperability not just about opening of account alone. When you open an account, interoperability also allows transactions to move from one bank to the other and also from one mobile money operator to the other.
“As it is today, the major challenge we have is actually interoperability because some banks are not allowing inflow of transactions from banks they don’t have good relationship with or they don’t have good perception about.
“They see it as competition and prevent instant inflow of transactions from such banks to their bank. Also in terms of wallets, today you cannot move money from Paga to Firstmonie or from Opay to Firstmonie. CBN and SANEF need to intervene for banks and wallets to see themselves as partners not competitors for us to deepen financial inclusion in its real sense.
“However, some of these things happening in the field, CBN and SANEF may not be aware; some of these issues I have highlighted may be deliberate for business sense and may also not be deliberate because of technology.
“Because there are no standard set for digital banking in Nigeria, some banks are not supposed to be playing in digital banking space because the level of their technological deployment cannot accommodate huge instant transactions to their bank.
Moreover, if we have to achieve full interoperability, there is needed to set standard for technology deployed by banks, super agents and mobile money operators,” he said.
According to Victor Olojo, National President, Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria (AMMBAN), “Financial inclusion should enable people irrespective of whatever financial institution they are operating. It means, if I have a Paga wallet I should be able to send money from my Paga wallet to Quickteller or PocketMoney wallet. Presently, this is not happening. What we have in the market place today is using different point of sale terminals for different banks, in that regard, I ‘m using 10 PoS for 10 banks. The ideal situation should be one PoS from Bank A should be able to attend to customers from nine other banks.
“That will solve the problem and the money I spent in buying the other nine PoS for other banks could be invested in the business. Imagine investing N900,000 in other areas of my mobile money business that will assist in driving financial inclusion. If interoperability issue is resolved, it means a problem of financial inclusion would have been adequately addressed”.