Tuesday, 9 July 2013
CBN yesterday unveiled plans to introduce biometric authentication of Point of Sale (POS) and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) to address safety of customers’ funds and avoid losses through compromise of Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) by 2015.
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mallam Lamido Sanusi Lamido giving the hint at the opening ceremony of the week-long stakeholders’ sensitisation forum on the just introduced cashless policy in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), said the initiative was amongst others being undertaking to ensure that frauds and other factors that promote financial exclusion of Nigerians are eliminated in the financial system.
Represented by Branch Controller, Abuja, John Chukwudi, Sanusi said the bank was aware of the problems being faced by Nigerians since the introduction of the cash-less policy and assured that the central bank and the deposit money banks (DMBs) were doing everything to address the challenges and make electronic banking the preferred option of transactions in the economy.
Mallam Sanusi said: “No doubt, with the introduction of cashless society, there would be prevalent use of credit card to perform transactions on ATM, POS and Internet banking, and these transactions would have to pass through the public infrastructure which are prone to cyber threats as being experienced in developed economy of the world. Case of debit and credit cards cloning are other vulnerable areas that need urgent attention for the country to reap the benefits of cashless society.
“The CBN had taken a giant step to gain the confidence of ATM consumers following the circular enforcing migration from magstripe type of debit card to chip and Pin (EMV compliance) type of debit card. Statistics show that this effort has reduced the fraud incidences by 90 per cent. “Many customers are now embracing these of electronic (ATM and POS) channels in their transactions because of near impossible efforts of would be fraudsters in being able to clone debit cards to perpetrate fraud as it was the case during the premigration era” he said.
Also taking into cognizance that the Nigerian economy is highly cashoriented in transactions of goods and services, especially retail transactions, which is not in line with the global trend, considering Nigeria’s ambition to be amongst the top 20 economies by the year 2020, he pointed out that the major focus of payments system reform was to increase the diversity and liquidity of payments instruments. According to him, the over reliance of customers on cash transactions necessitated the Payments System Vision (PSV) 2020 with the primary objective of promoting widespread application of end-to-end e-payments in Nigeria, adding that a safe and effective payment infrastructure is core to the financial stability of any country.
