Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has expressed concern about the difficulty Nigerians are having in obtaining new Naira notes.
During a meeting with some FinTech players, Osinbajo charged them with investigating possible ways to alleviate the hardship.
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To address the worrying situation, he urged regulators and banks to send more FinTechs and money agents to the hinterlands.
“You need cash to pay for transport. For instance, in Abuja how do you take ‘drop or along’ or use a Keke NAPEP without cash, buy foodstuff on the road or in canteens, or even buy recharge cards?
“Parents with kids in public schools give money daily to their children for lunch, most commerce is informal, so you need cash for most things,” he pointed out.
During the interactive session with a number of FinTech investors and ecosystem players, the Vice President stated that the Central Bank of Nigeria and commercial banks should collaborate with all FinTechs that have mobile money agents, rather than just a few of them, in order to reach the most remote parts of the country.
According to him, “it seems to me that banks must engage their mobile money operators – FinTechs with mobile money licenses and many of them have micro-finance bank licenses now and already has a network of mobile money agents or human banks or human ATMs (as they are sometimes called) who are responsible to them and they can supervise by themselves. They can do currency swaps and open bank accounts.”
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The Vice President acknowledged that “there are logistical challenges that have to be addressed by the CBN and the banks, especially from the point of view of the average Nigerian and those in the hinterland who hardly use any electronic platforms.”
He also noted that, while there has always been some failure rate in online banking and money transactions, they have become even more difficult now that the number of transactions congesting the system has increased.
His words: “So where in the past you used POS or any of the electronic platforms, you had maybe 20%-30% failure rate, now because everyone is trying to get on those platforms, obviously, the failure rate is much more and the problems are much more pronounced.”
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