Super Agents and agents under them in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) financial inclusion initiative are today locked in Point of Sale chargeback issues, which has resulted in some agents going out of business, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.

One of the cases involves Innovectives a super- agent in Shared Agent Network Expansion Facilities (SANEF) programme and Ecosystems Hybrid Network, where Innovectives according Ecosystem have under paid her and agents under its channel to a turn of N15 million arising from PoS chargeback between January and July this year.

Fasasi Sarafadeen Atanda, managing director, Ecosystem Hybrid Network, said the issue has lingered for this long because there is no dispute mechanism in settlement issues between providers and agents.

“The issues around PoS chargeback are beyond debit of customers as there is no complaint mechanism in place for financial inclusion services.

“In a formal banking system, there is complaint mechanism where customers are allowed to lodge complaint and tracking number given to them; if such issue were not resolved the customer can escalate it to CBN with the tracking number.

“For Agency banking, which is informal and still financial service the mechanism of formal should not be used in resolving complaints as the scenario are different.

Responding to the claims, Emmanuel Agha, chief executive officer, Innovectives, said that what his company owes Ecosystem is N8.6million of which N2million has been paid.

“The way PoS chargeback is structured, you have to wait for the banks to pay you and this takes a long time for it to be resolved,” he said.

He added that because other agents are involved in the issues his company has started paying Ecosystem without waiting for banks to refund her, noting that the issue of PoS chargeback with agents is not peculiar to his company but an industry issue that needs to be address.

Explaining PoS chargeback and its delay as frustrating for PoS as a payment channel, Tosin Eniolorunda, chief executive officer, TeamApt, said: “chargeback is when a customer buys goods or service at a point of sale terminal and was debited but the PoS did not print receipt showing a successful transaction, because it did not print a receipt, the merchant will refuse to give the customer the goods he requested for, while your account have been debited. In this situation, you will have to go to your own bank which is not the bank of your merchant and file a claim of your money that is called chargeback.

“The problem is resolved today by your bank logging it against the merchant and the merchant bank needs to investigate if that claim is correct or not, if it is true he did not give the customer the value, he will attest to the bank that it is true and for his bank to return the money to the customer. If it is not true the bank will request for evidence that the merchant actually gave the customer the value.

“The evidence that is accepted today in the industry is a paper receipt. That paper that was printed from the PoS, you need to go and get it, scan it and attest to the bank you gave that customer his value for the money not to be refunded.

“Imagine a very larger merchant that prints a lot of receipts you need to be storing PoS receipts and that receipt fads away with time.

“This challenge is why merchants are crying about chargebacks because they cannot respond appropriately and have only three days to do that before they will be charged. The way to solve it is to prevent the merchants from needing to present receipt which is through e-journal,” he explained.

Electronic journal is ability of PoS to keep an evidence of all its transactions, when it keeps all those evidences; it sends them to a remote server at the bank of the merchant.

“POS has the capacity to do electronic journal. A regulatory push for PTSPs to implement e-journal will go a long way to addressing this problem. If regulator mandates that operators should implement e-journal in the next two months it will be done”.