Withdrawals ahead of postponed elections hit 2.2m

Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBBS) has shown that bank customers carried out about 2.2 million transactions on the NIBBS Instant Pay platform a day to the postponed presidential and National Assembly elections.

Live updates provided by the NIBSS showed that Nigerians make last-minute withdrawals and purchases in readiness for the 2019 polls, online banking transactions via NIP hit exactly 2,235,765 transactions at 5.54 pm on Thursday.

According to the data, Point of Sales (PoS) transactions carried out by merchants and retailers in the country reached 915,133 at 5.54 pm on the same day.

NIP is an online real-time product that facilitates instant payment of bills on an account.

Analyses of the live electronic payment data indicated that a low failure rate of 0.62 per cent was recorded on the NIP platform, with customers experiencing a total of 15,588 failed transactions.

The data showed that funds transfer formed the bulk of the volume of the NIP transactions.

NIP has been adjudged the most preferred platform for electronic payment having grossed more transactions in monetary terms than PoS and e-Bills Payment over the years.

However, the data indicated that transactions on PoS had a high failure rate of 17.03 per cent as the volume of failed transactions on the terminals stood at 155,832 at the same time.

NIP recorded the highest volume of transactions – 38,948 – at 11.50am, while electronic payment on PoS peaked at 5.20pm, recording a volume of 19,403.

Data on the e-payment platform efficiency showed the destination bank for electronic payment contributed the most to failed NIP transactions between January 18 to February 8, 2019.

Within the 21 days under review, the data indicated that the NIBSS platform had not in any way contributed to the failed NIP transactions while the contributions of the customer and originating banks to the failed transaction were minimal.

Stakeholders in the industry have attributed the high rate of failed transactions on PoS to poor network and payment systems that use multiple SIM cards, WiFi, or Local Area Network have been developed to address this.

Commenting on the factors responsible for the failed transactions, Lilian Phido, head, Corporate Communications, NIBSS, recently said rejected transactions could be linked to system downtime for specific banks or network issues emanating from a specific service provider.

She explained that the downtime in one bank could cause a failed transaction in another bank, especially when the transaction was interbank.

“It could be a local issue to a particular bank due to system downtime. It could be from the receiving bank or a collecting bank. If the glitch is from NIBSS, then that means no PoS will work. What we do is to call the service provider’s attention to the glitch. This is because every glitch on one stakeholder’s system will affect every other person,” she said.