Banks Record 63,651 Failed Instant Payment Transactions

• Banks Record 63,651 Failed Instant Payment Transactions

Bank customers experienced 63,651 failed electronic payment transactions on the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System Instant Pay platform on Friday.

NIP, an online real-time product that facilitates instant payment of bills on an account, as of 5.05 pm on Friday, recorded a total volume of 1.16 million transactions, live updates provided by the NIBSS showed.

Analyses of the live electronic payment data indicated that a failure rate of 3.87 per cent was recorded on the platform.

The data showed that the name enquiry accounted for most of the NIP activities as over one million bank customers requested for account names while 536,351 funds transfer transactions were reported.

NIP has been adjudged the most preferred platform for electronic payment having grossed more transactions in monetary terms than NEFT, Point of Sale and e-Bills Payment over the years.

A breakdown of the statistics also showed that PoS transactions carried out by retailers in the country also had a high failure rate of 14.21 per cent as of 5.05 pm on the same day, out of a total transaction volume of 415,027.

The live updates showed that the volume of failed transactions on PoS stood at 59,278 at the same time.

The NIP on Friday recorded the highest volume of transactions at 1.20pm, while electronic payment on PoS peaked at 5 pm.

The data on the e-payment platform’s efficiency showed the destination bank for electronic payment contributed the most to failed NIP transactions between October 19 and November 9, 2018.

Within the 21 days under review, the data indicated that the NIBSS platform had not in any way contributed to the failed NIP transactions while the contribution of the customers to declined transactions had remained stable at 0.1 per cent.

Stakeholders in the industry have attributed the high rate of failed transactions on PoS to poor network and payment systems that use multiple SIM cards, among others.

Commenting on the factors responsible for the failed transactions, the Head, Corporate Communications, NIBSS, Lilian Phido, recently said rejected transactions could be linked to system downtime for specific banks or network issues emanating from a specific service provider.

She explained that the downtime in one bank could cause a failed transaction in another bank, especially when the transaction is interbank.

“It could be a local issue to a particular bank due to a system downtime. It could be from the receiving bank or a collecting bank. If the glitch is from NIBSS, then that means no PoS will work. What we do is to call the service provider’s attention to the glitch. This is because every glitch on one stakeholder’s system will affect every other person,” she added.