Before June 2014, Central Bank of Nigeria has said the cashless policy will be extended nationwide. This policy is presently in operation in some states like Lagos and huge success have been recorded in this states.
Payments are now made in these states through POS. Now there are over 150,000 POS nationwide compared to the 10,000 in operation two years ago.
Mr. Tunde Lemo, the Deputy Governor of CBN, said that apex bank was on top of the plan to roll out this cashless policy nationwide by second quarter of 2014. He made this known at the 20th anniversary of the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) titled: ‘The Evolution to the Future Cashless Nigeria: Positioning the Nigerian Payment and Settlement Ecosystem for Cash-less Reality,’ held in Lagos.
Lemo said, ‘We have been talking about how to enhance connectivity and one of the things agreed was to work with some service providers. But beyond that, we looked and decided what else to do, particularly outside Lagos now that we have rolled out the cashless policy to six other states. Today, we have licensed about 21 mobile money operators, so how do we now link mobile money to our PoS? If mobile phones can serve as touch points, our transactions would go up rapidly. ‘We hope to rollout to all the states by the second quarter of next year and we hope that by next year, as we roll out more PoS machines, we have to see how we can integrate the mobile phones into the network because in the hinterlands, the challenges would be more,’ Lemo explained.
The Central Bank of Nigeria believes they have made a significant impact in the society through this system. They intend to encourage the cashless system policy which should make the system more efficient in the country. Mr Tunde Lemo also said CBN wants to drive the Nigeria economy to be one of the 20 biggest economies in the world by 2020.
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