NIBSS, Banks Spend N400m on Epayment Incentives

THE Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) and banks in the country have spent over N400 million to provide incentives to promote adoption of electronic payment in the country.

Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, NIBSS, Mr. Ade Shonubi disclosed this yesterday while addressing a press conference on the forthcoming Efficiency Award organised by the company to reward and recognize outstanding stakeholders in the promotion of electronic payment.

He said, “The banks have spent over N400 million as incentives under electronic payment incentives scheme. “The electronic payment incentives scheme (EPIS) is an initiative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bankers Committee, and the banks in Nigeria to promote electronic payment in Nigeria.

“There were series of activities around it that started over a year ago. One of the first thing is when we were refunding cash back to people, and at the end of the month, you receive some amount of money for using your PoS, and then we had adverts. Recently, we have inaugurated a loyalty scheme where you can collect points, so that as you use your card you get points and also those in the shops that are manning the devices, at the end of the month they can get some points to encourage them to push people to use their cards and other means of payments. This week we go to the next level which is to recognise institutions, financial and public, those over the last 12 months, in 2015, have been active in the electronic payment space. There are quite a lot of categories and it would take place on Thursday.”

Commenting on the impact of the electronic payment incentives scheme on the level of epayment transactions in the country, Shonubi said, “In the month of December we had 18 million transactions on our platform. That is jus for one month. On the average we do about 15 million transactions in a month. Before now it was much lower than that. So clearly the numbers are moving up.”

Providing details of the transactions, he said, “In terms of volume in January 2015, our instant payment platform was doing 4.2 million transactions per month, by December it was 8.3 million, almost double. Point of Sale (PoS) transactions was about 2.5 million in January 2015; it ended the year at 3.9 million. For cheques, we were doing about 1.1 million in January 2015.

“So when we talk about the adoption, when we look at the numbers, it has been going up in terms of transactions per month. So we feel part of what has helped is this incentives scheme and the awareness that goes with it.”

Vanguard