Do you owe a bank? Your name may be published soon

In efforts to ensure continued safety and soundness of the banking industry, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Bankers Committee on Thursday stated that it will publish the names of borrowers that refuse to pay up their loans.

Asides that, it was also decided that one thing to do is to stop them from getting access to foreign exchange.

The committee comprising top management of CBN, Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) and chief executives of banks, also decided to reduce limit on naira debit Visa and Mastercard. The limit represents the amount of dollars that card holders can spend or withdraw through the cards when they are out of the country.

Director, Banking Supervision Department, CBN, Dr. Tokunbo Martins disclosed this at a press conference at the end of the Bankers Committee held in Lagos. Also at the press conference were the Chief Executive Officer of Union Bank, Mr Emeka Emuwa, Chief Executive of Standard Chartered, Mrs Bola Adesola, Chief Executive of Citibank Nigeria, Mr. Omar Hafeez, and the CBN Director of Corporate Communications, Alhaji Ibrahim Muazu.

Speaking on the decision to stop bad debtors from purchasing dollars from interbank market, Tokunbo Martins said, “It is not all debtors. It is the bad, the chronic debtors, those ones that are just deliberately refusing to pay. Those are the kind of debtors we are talking about. The industry has a standard. We don’t want non performing loans to be more than five per cent of the total loans in the industry.

“Currently total loans in the industry is between N13 trillion to N15 trillion. Right now we have not reached that upper limit of five percent but we don’t want to get there and that is why we decided we need to come up with this measure. Currently the non performing loan in the industry is about 3.3 percent, but we don’t want to get to the limit of five percent”.

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