Banks record 1.65m instant payments on New Year’s day

Data obtained from the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) show that the volume of transactions executed by bank customers in the country reached 1.65 million on New Year’s day.

According to the live updates provided, NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) transactions stood at 1,646,443 as of 3.54pm on 1st January 2020.

The high volume must have been triggered by the New Year celebrations across the country, which prompted many Nigerians and foreign nationals in the country to spend heavily on entertainment and shopping according to the spirit of the season.

The NIBSS data equally demonstrate that failed transaction rate was low on New Year’s day, standing at 0.91%. This implies that 14,985 fail transactions were recorded as against a successful payment volume of 1.631 million.

Trends over the years have shown that the NIP is the most active electronic payment platform in Nigeria, much bigger than the Point of Sales Terminal (POS) as far as the total value of transactions is concerned.

The total number of deals carried out via the POS platform as of 3.54pm on New Year’s day was 555,976. 71,715 transactions, representing 12.92% of the entire POS transaction volume, were reported as failed deals.

Analysis of the e-platform efficiency data reveals that factors such as system malfunction, account name mismatch and customers exceeding transfer limits accounted most for the failed transactions recorded via the NIP platform.

Read also: 2019 ECONOMY ROUNDUP: Inflation, Policies, Appointments, Sanctions, GDP. What’s in stock for 2020?

For the POS platform, errors originating from customers, acquirer banks and issuer banks constituted roughly five per cent of the failure rate.

Interestingly, the New Year’s Day coincided with the effective date of the newly reviewed bank charges by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

With the new reform, the fee chargeable on every withdrawal carried out on other bank’s ATM is now N35 as against the former N65.

For electronic payments, the CBN replaced a graduated fee scale method for electronic transfers with a flat fee method with the maximum of N50. This means that any transfer between banks below N10,000 will attract a maximum of N10 charge. Meanwhile, any transaction of this type above N50,000 will attract a N50 charge.

The CBN stopped card maintenance fee on current accounts and reviewed the card maintenance fee on savings accounts from N50 per month to N50 per quarter.

Also, annual card maintenance fee on cards denominated in foreign currency was slashed from $20 to $10.

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now