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CBN shifts BVN deadline to June for Diaspora customers

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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has hinted of plans to move Bank Verification Number, BVN, for Nigerians in Diaspora to June 30, Ripples has gathered.

CBN Deputy Director, Electronic Payment, Samson Agboola, confirmed this at a one-day interactive enlightenment session with stakeholders on cash-less policy held in Lagos at the weekend.

According to him, such action would allow customers to complete the enrollment and link the BVN to their banks accounts.

The deadline was initially extended from January 31 to June 30, this year. The extension followed observations by the CBN showing the low percentage of registration of Nigeria banks’ customers in Diaspora, which is still not addressed.

This, he said, may be attributed to lack of accessibility to registration centres and unavailability of registration centres in some cities where Nigerian population is high.

He explained that the BVN has been able to enhance the Know Your Customer (KYC) policy of the apex bank in commercial lenders adding that the BVN captures 22 fields at enrollment.

Agboola said 57.2 million customers have so far be registered as at May 31, while 34.8 million accounts have been successfully linked to the BVN platform.

“The BVN project is key to the development of payment system in Nigeria and remains a bigger step in KYC. For authentification purposes, individuals performing banking transactions such as applying for loans shall be required to identify themselves using their biometric features which will be matched against the information in the central database,” he said.

Continuing, he said, “update of customers’ information shall be done at their bank branches physically even as no individual can have two or more BVNs. BVN has 11 digit numbers”.

The CBN registration guidelines provided by the CBN for clients in Diaspora show that BVN enrolment can be done at offshore branches of any Nigerian bank and through the service centres of the two service providers, Online Integrated Solutions (OIS) and VFS Global, the apex bank engaged.

The centres provided to further drive enrolment are: London, Leicester and Manchester in the United Kingdom; Dubai; Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in China; Jeddah, Riyadh and Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia; Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US. Others are: Toronto and Vancouver in Canada; Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Ankara, Turkey; Kiev, Ukraine; New Delhi, India; Moscow, Russia; Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney in Australia

Aside China and India, the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) is also working on extending the BVN project to Washington DC, Johannesburg, and Atlanta. Other cities participating in the scheme are Guangzhou, London, Leicester, Houston and New York City.

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