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Dollar: CBN moves closer to unify rates for banks, BDCs

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6 years ago

June 5, 2018

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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has approved an upward review of the trading margin for operators of Bureau De Change (BDC) to N357/$1 (buying) and sell at N360/$1 (selling). This gives the operators a N3 margin per dollar.

This means that banks and BDCs alike will buy the United States dollar at N357 per dollar to sell N360. He said this would provide a positive margin of N3 per dollar sold to BDC operators by the apex bank.

For banks, this is the rate at which it buys forex for PTA and BTA transactions; different from the interbank rate.

Isaac Okorafor, CBN Acting Director, Corporate Communications Department, noted that the decision was to give BDCs a level playing field to compete with other authorized foreign exchange dealers, the Nations reports.

He urged BDC operators to abide by the new guidelines and not seek to exploit eager customers by selling above the N360 band. He warned that erring BDCs would be sanctioned in any case of infraction established against them.

Recall that in its bid to achieve convergence between the interbank markets and BDCs, the CBN had in 2017 directed licensed BDCs in the country to purchase Foreign Exchange from it at the rate of N360 to a dollar, and sell to customers at no more than N362.

Subsequently, the apex bank recently made it mandatory for all the BDC operators in the country to access foreign exchange from it three times a week.

This, however, did not go down well with Association of Bureau de Change Operators in Nigeria (ABCON) who faulted the new directive and urged the CBN to reverse the directive.

Commenting on the directive, Aminu Gwadabe, Association of Bureaux de Change Operators of Nigeria (ABCON) president, said the directive is not acceptable.

Gwadabe had urged the apex bank to review the rates at which dollar is sold to BDCs to allow them to compete favourably.

Also, CBN in its first sale of the month, on Monday, offered $100 million to dealers in the wholesale segment of the market to meet the requests of customers.

Similarly, the bank also sold $55 million each to customers in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) window as well as those in the Invisible segment.