Financial technology experts have tasked banks to stop rolling out branches but channel more investments on Point of Sales terminals.
They also urged the banks to educate their depositors on the enormous capabilities of the PoS device to make agent-banking network viable.
Managing Director, Innovectives Limited, Mr. Emmanual Agha, who spoke with our correspondent in Lagos, explained that PoS has an important role in the Central Bank of Nigeria’s financial inclusion policy.
He said, “You can open an account on a PoS terminal; make deposit, withdrawal, transfer bill payments, among other services. Consider the cost of building a bank branch to the cost of PoS device; this will give you an idea that a bank could stop rolling out branches and invest in PoS and still achieve the targets of financial inclusion. With this, we are going to make significant millage in the financial inclusion efforts of the CBN.”
According to him, the need for banks to enlighten their customers on the various banking services that can be carried out on PoS at agent-banking locations, cannot be over-emphasised.
Agha said, “The banks need to enlighten the public that there is a lot more they can do on the PoS at agent location, apart from cash-in and cash-out. Banks have a role to play in putting their voices out there; they are waiting for the agents to do all the heavy lifting and it is not going to happen.
“Since all the banks are connected to Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, and since the NIBSS came up with a single application programming interface, they should all adopt it. This means I don’t need to integrate with all the banks to attend to customers from other banks at an agent
location.”
National President, Association of Mobile Money Agents of Nigeria, Mr. Victor Olojo, also called for efforts to revamp agent-banking networks, to ensure that it attracts more attention by making it viable and profitable.
He said, “We have to ensure that technologies that are deployed for agent banking are compactable with the environment where it is been deployed. We have observed that policy formations around financial inclusion for rural areas are done by people that don’t understand behavioural pattern of the rural populace in Nigeria. It has always been top-bottom approach as against bottom-top
approach.”
