PoS: Errors Cause 323,663 Failed Payments Nationwide

• PoS: Errors Cause 323,663 Failed Payments Nationwide

Latest reports from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) revealed that out of 1,269,761 Point of Sale (PoS) transactions performed in the country as of Thursday  5th August, failed transactions accounted for 25.49 per cent or 323,662 of total PoS transactions.

The data released by the NIBSS further showed that issuer banks contributed to most of the transaction errors since 107,737 out of the total PoS transaction errors were attributed to these banks while a relatively small amount at 75,805 errors were attributed to the beneficiary banks.

The errors by the acquirer banks, however, played a major role in the failure rate of PoS transactions by retailers and merchants in the country.

According to the report, customers also contributed to the PoS failure rate at 101,846 as of 6.21pm on Thursday.

The report also showed that the processing error of NIBSS contributed at a meagre percentage of 0.14 and that neither NIBSS nor security breach had any significant negative effect on PoS transactions.

According to the statistics released, bank customers carried out a total of 3,038,734 transactions on NIBSS Instant Payment Platform (NIP).

The NIBSS blamed the unavailability of beneficiary banks for 6,723 failed transactions out of the 14,241 transaction errors attributed to NIP.

Account name mismatch and exceeded transfer limit were some of the other reasons for NIP transaction errors according to the report.

The NIBSS had earlier in April announced that it had made efforts to improve the efficacy of the electronic payment system.

According to the NIBSS official website, “NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) is an account-number based, online-real-time Inter-Bank payment solution developed in the year 2011 by NIBSS. It is the Nigerian financial industry’s preferred funds transfer platform that guarantees instant value to the beneficiary. The NIP service commenced with only two (2) commercial banks as participants. However, today, the number of participants has grown to include all commercial banks, Micro-Finance banks (MFBs), and Mobile Money Operators (MMOs).”