The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is working with the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) to provide insurance cover for users of mobile banking services as a way of mitigating losses that could arise from that such transactions.
CBN Assistant Director, Banking and Payment System, Samson Agboola, who made this known in Akure yesterday, said the two regulators were considering a trustee arrangement for the 15 mobile payment companies already granted licenses by the CBN and others coming after them.
“We are collaborating with NDIC and we are coming up with a kind of insurance cover. We are looking at a trustee arrangement for the depositors in mobile payments so that if anything should happen to the institutions, their money would not be lost,” he said.
He however maintained that the companies currently have settlement banks which are in custody of their funds and these banks serve as collateral for them.
“Presently, what we have done is that all the 15 mobile payment companies that have been given licenses have their settlement banks and the money that is used within this system is kept in a pool account and the bank now serves as collateral for them. So presently, there is no problem.”
Agboola, who represented the CBN Director of Banking and Payment System, Mr. Titus Fatokun, in his presentation, said that the 15 licensed mobile payment companies have as at May 2012, recorded total transaction value of N4.67 bn from 468,312 volume of transactions.
According to him, the transaction value was achieved through the use of well managed and developed Mobile Agent Network(MAN) spread across the country which includes 1.87 million subscribers and 19,042 agents.