The Deputy Governor (Operations) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Tunde Lemo, has revealed that the value of mobile money transactions, which involves the use of mobile phones as banking tools for transfer and payment across the country, stood at N10,141,564,186.00, as at the end of August.Lemo, who made the disclosure in a paper titled: ‘Cashless Economy: The Pains, The Gains and The Road Ahead,’ at a recent international conference on Cyber Security held in Abuja, said fully licensed mobile payment operators recorded 1,639,608 transactions. He expressed optimism that the figure would grow geometrically as awareness and application of mobile money transfer increases.
According to him, while cash serves transactional purpose within the economy, their social and economic costs are astounding. He pointed out that opportunities abound to leverage digital technology to migrate part of the heavy cash transactions through the use of electronic payment channels.
He noted that the digital economy provides the opportunity to capture payment flow in an economy more accurately, while at the same addressing leakages in revenue in both the private and the public sector.
He said: “In Nigeria, there are over 100 million mobile phones available to serve customers while there are less than 6,000 bank branches, 12,000 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and 200,000 Point of Sale (PoS) terminals and less than 20 million bank accounts.”
According to Lemo, mobile money remains one of the easiest routes to ensuring that the unbanked segments of the economy are brought into the financial system.
The deputy governor however said that the rise of cyber fraud poses a great challenge to the cashless society, adding: “Cybercrime has surpassed illicit drug trade as global top revenue earner for organised crimes. The cybercrime network has become a highly organised ecosystem with its own value chain.”
Malicious hackers, he said, execute over 7,000 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks every day.
He attributed the prevalence of fraud globally to the growing technophobia as users are apprehensive for the safety of their funds on electronic payments’ platforms.
He said: “Reluctance in adoption of electronic payments is equally attributable to security concerns as well as low level of awareness on personal responsibility for the protection of identity and account details are negative effect of reported cases of successful and unresolved e-fraud incidences, unbridled and unchecked activities of hackers, deluge of unsolicited spam and fraudulent mails.”
Lemo said CBN had taken steps to ensure that it is ahead of the curve in the implementation of improved electronic payments solutions to forestall negative consequences of cyber threats to electronic payment platforms.
On the management of electronic payment fraud, he said: “The CBN has put in place various standards to ensure that compromise on the various channels is curtailed.”
In 2009 for example, Lemo said all cards issued in the country were mandated to have the chip plus PIN technology which reduced card fraud by over 90 per cent.
