CBN urges businesses to adopt eNaira to lessen demand for cash
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has urged more businesses to adopt the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)-eNaira- for transactions and trade, as queues for cash withdrawals in banking halls and at Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) continue,
This is even as it said, it is in discussions with more telecommunication companies on the adoption of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) which, it noted, has almost no downtime.
Presently, eNaira transactions are only enabled on MTN and 9mobile networks.
Speaking at a media parley in Lagos yesterday, CBN coordinator on eNaira, Ms. Rakiya Mohammed, who was represented by eNaira Project Giant Team, Otaru Abdulkadir said, the eNaira also came in to create an efficient and resilient environment for Nigeria’s electronic payments and transactions.
“Our aim of the eNaira includes reaching out to the financially excluded and the unbanked. We had to not only do something that works on the smartphone but something that works on any feature phone and with tech companies coming on board, such as BullNet, people with limited internet services can fund their eNaira wallet and have a safe wallet to be able to transact without having to go through the difficulties of having cash at hand.
“With the eNaira, we have a resilient infrastructure that can handle the requirements of the cashless policy and if we are able to drive the adoption of the eNaira efficiently, this will take away the pressure of the current cash crunch and issues with financial transactions in the country.
“We are still in the process of getting more telcos to buy into the USSD. We have a third-party service and they were able to get us MTN and 9Mobile. We are already speaking to Airtel and Glo as well and soon we will have them onboard with the eNaira,” she pointed out.
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Stating that, people have been quite receptive to the eNaira, she added that “the figure we have at the moment is a successful growing figure. However, pending when we can have more tech companies, banks, and businesses, then we can have a full ecosystem or create a new eNaira ecosystem.”
To her, “hence, we need to create businesses where you can spend with the eNaira and this is what the CBN has been doing in that area to make the innovation to be successful.
“We are also planning to onboard the traders at Balogun Market, thankfully, we have a representative here regardless of the type of phone they use.
We have had a lot of tech firms, PoS operators coming forward and we like what firms such as BullNet is doing and we are using this opportunity to appeal to stakeholders in this transactional ecosystem which includes; merchants, traders, organisations to come onboard with the eNaira project just in case they need assistance.”
