New Telegraph

Banks: Forex requests’ approval’ll depend on ‘availability of funds’

As the lingering foreign exchange scarcity continues to worsen, some Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) in the country have started notifying their customers that all foreign currency requests will henceforth be treated, “subject to availability of funds.”

In effect, this means that the DMBs have declared that their ability to fulfil any request that their customers make to buy foreign currency will now hinge on if they(lenders) can access forex to meet such requests. For instance, in an email titled, “Update on Foreign currency request”, sent to its customers yesterday, which was sighted by Saturday Telegraph, one of the country’s Tier-2 banks, announced that it had reviewed the process of fulfilling FX requests in order to ensure that it can, “meet the needs of more customers.” Specifically, the bank stated that, henceforth, its customers can only access $1,500 quarterly for maintenance/ upkeep requests. The lender also an nounced that it will now only process maintenance/ upkeep requests for customers whose school fees were paid through it.

According to the email, applicants who approach the bank to process maintenance/ upkeep for school fees requests that were processed through other lenders, “will be advised to contact those banks for their equivalent maintenance/upkeep.” In addition, the email stated that processing school fees and maintenance/upkeep requests may now take up to 60 days from the approval date and that Personal Travel Allowance(PTA)/Business Travel Allowance (BTA) requests will be disbursed within 14 days of approval. Saturday Telegraph recently reported that as part of their measures to address the acute forex scarcity, most DMBs suspended individual withdrawals with Naira debit cards abroad and toughened limits on online payments. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had announced in February that it might stop dollar sales to lenders this year.

Analysts note despite being the leading producer of crude oil on the continent, Nigeria has not been able to benefit from high oil prices, occasioned by the Russia- Ukraine war, as oil theft and other security challenges in its oil producing regions, have made it impossible for the country to meet its Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota. As a result, the the expected accretion to the nation’s external reserves (oil accounts for about 90 per cent of Nigeria’s export earnings) since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February has not really materialized.

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