The Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, has explained why Point of Sale (PoS) agents are needed in the cashless policy of the apex bank.
Emefiele said the POS agents are needed because it was important to ensure that the people at the hinterlands where there may not be financial institutions are given access to financial services.
The CBN governor said the quickest financial service would be the POS at the rural communities. The apex bank’s Deputy Governor, the Financial System Stability, A’isha Ahmed, who represented Emefiele stated this on Thursday, when she appeared before the House of Representatives to brief the lawmakers on the recent monetary policies of the bank, especially the cash withdrawal limit.
According to him, there were 6,500 bank locations, 900,000 POS terminals, 14,000 Automatic Teller Machines, ATMs, across the country, and 1.4 million agents nationwide.
He said every local government in Nigeria has an agent represented, adding that there were N6 trillion in POS transactions as against N48 billion in 2012 when the policy was started. Today, we have a very robust payment system that includes bank branches, branches of micro-finance banks, POS machines, ATM machines, agent banking, E-Naira, and many other options.
“To be specific, between the bank and the micro-finance banks, we have 6,500 locations, 900,000 POS terminals, 14,000 ATMs across the country, and 1.4 million agents nationwide; and every single local government in Nigeria has agents represented. We also have a proliferation of electronic transactions.
We have also amended the processing from 5 and 10 percent downward to 3 and 5 percent. The average transaction per individual that walks up to an agent is about N18,000″, he further clarified.
