Customer, Bank Errors Push PoS Failed Payments to 17%

• Customer, Bank Errors Push PoS Failed Payments to 17%

Nigerians continue to experience declined transactions on Point of Sales terminals all over the country as failed PoS transactions hit 180,048 on Tuesday evening.

Live transaction updates obtained from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System showed that payment on PoS terminals had a high failure rate of 16.64 per cent out of a total of 1,081,339 transactions conducted as of 7 pm.

According to the data, the customers contributed the most to the failure of the transactions as 105,282 of the failed transactions were attributed to errors they committed.

The statistics indicated that 41,805 errors emanated from the acquirer bank and 25,768 errors, which originated from the issuer bank, also contributed significantly to the failed funds transfer carried out by retailers and merchants across the country.

However, the updates showed that the NIBSS platform and security breach had not in any way contributed to the unsuccessful payments, while the processor errors contributed minimally at 0.44 per cent.

NIBSS in April said measures had been taken to ensure efficiency in the electronic payment system and achieve shorter transaction time.

The acting Managing Director, NIBSS, Mr Niyi Ajao, had said, “The total turn-around-time had been configured at 15 seconds in agreement with banks and processors. However, delayed responses from issuers after this timeout in recent times could cause authorised debits not to return to the terminal before the set TAT.”

Ajao explained that the timeout was the total turn-around-time for a PoS transaction cycle from the time it was received to the time a response was sent back to the terminal.

Some of the remedial steps taken in March, he said, included the adjustment of the timeout to 20 seconds from 15 seconds on March 14, 2019, and the adjustment of the timeout to 45 seconds from 20 seconds on March 19, 2019.