Inadequate ATMs, PoS Hinder Cashless Lagos Initiative

culled from: Leadership.ng

The cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to encourage a shift from physical use of cash to electronic payments may have suffered some setbacks with the inadequacy of automate teller machines (ATMs) and Point of Sale (PoS) terminals in the country.

The apex bank has asked  banks to kick-off the Cashless Lagos initiative from January 1, 2012, a pilot test for the eventual introduction of the policy across the country.

However, inadequate provision of ATMs and PoS is hindering the successful implementation of the scheme.

Investigation by LEADERSHIP revealed that there are only 10,000 ATMs and 14,000 PoS that are functional in the country on the platform of Interswitch, West Africa’s leading transaction switching and e-payment network which connects all the banks, financial, cable broadcasting and telecommunications operators.

Electronic commerce points like the new Ikeja Shopping Mall controlled Shoprite still lack the use of PoS for commercial transactions. Apart from a few ATMs which hardly have cash, all the shops including Shoprite at the mall are yet to be connected to PoS platform of Interswitch.

Shoppers are made to part with cash for all transactions.

Also, the strike action called by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC) and civil societies exposed the lack of preparedness of the banks for Cashless Lagos. Many banks in the suburbs of Lagos had their ATMs without cash, while the few that had cash witnessed long queues as bank customers waited to withdraw money.

Only few banks like GTBank and Stanbic IBTC have deployed PoS for customers to make withdrawals inside their banking halls instead of queuing up on long lines. At the weekend there were stampedes in front of banks in suburbs like IyanaIpaja, Akute, Akowonjo, Agbado and Ikotun as people rushed to make cash withdrawals in fear of another round of labour strike.

Deputy Governor, Operation, CBN, Mr. Tunde Lemo, had at a seminar organised by all the banks ahead of the January 1, 2012 implementation of Cashless Lagos said banks were expected to add 40,000 PoS to the e-payment network.

Lemo said CBN has a target of deploying 150,000 PoS machines by end December 2012 which would be scaled up to 375,000 PoS terminals by the end of 2015 when it hoped to have attained benchmark PoS penetration of 2, 247 PoS per 100,000 adult population as obtainable currently in Brazil.