The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Tuesday called for support from the banking sector to strengthen consumer confidence in the country’s payment system.
The CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, made the call in Abuja while delivering a keynote address at the eighth Annual Banking and Finance Conference.
The conference, with the theme: ‘Positioning Nigeria’s payments system for global competitiveness’ was organised by the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria.
Emefiele said while the central bank had come a long way in repositioning the country’s payment system; there was a need to ensure its security and reliability.
He listed some of the challenges facing the system as weak risk management frameworks, security issues, resistance of target customers to patronise new products and lack of unique identifier for customers across institutions.
Others are high operating costs, interconnectivity of networks, low level of card usage on Point of Sale terminals and non-transparent pricing.
Represented by the Deputy Governor, Economic Policy, CBN, Dr. Sarah Alade, the governor said through some of the bank’s initiative, there had been a drop in card, related fraud by 98 per cent.
He said. “While many of the CBN’s efforts have gone into the transformation of the payment system in line with global trends, we should not lose sight of the associated risks and challenges, which I hope will be adequately addressed at this conference.
“By this, we will be able to strengthen consumer confidence in the safety, security and reliability of our payment systems, bearing in mind that when this trust is undermined; then, public confidence in the financial services industry is eroded and the entire economy loses.”
President Goodluck Jonathan, while declaring the conference open, said as a self-regulatory organisation, the CIBN was a major stakeholder in the transformation initiative of the Federal Government.
