New Telegraph

E-payment deals advance by 72% in 2021

as NIP hits N271.9trn

Electronic transactions over the Nigeria Inter- Bank Settlement Systems (NIBSS) Instant Payment grew by 72 per cent in 2021. With this, the country maintained the yearly growth in e-payment as more Nigerians embraced the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). According to the NIBSS data, between January and December 2021, transactions valued at N271.9 trillion were recorded over the NIP platform, compared with N158.2 trillion recorded in 2020, representing 72 per cent growth. The NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) is an account-numberbased, online-real-time Inter- Bank payment solution developed in year 2011 by NIBSS.

It is the Nigerian financial industry’s preferred funds transfer platform that guarantees instant value to the beneficiary. According to NIBSS, over the years, Nigerian banks have exposed NIP through their various channels, that is, internet banking, bank branch, Kiosks, mobile apps, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), POS, ATM, etc. to their customers. A breakdown of the 12 months transactions value showed that bank customers transacted deals valued at N18.5 trillion over the NIBSS platform in January 2021. In February, the value of transactions stood at N18.3 trillion while it rose to N22 trillion in March.

In April, the NIP transactions value was N20.6 trillion, while it hit N20.7 million in May. In June, transactions valued at N23 trillion were recorded on the electronic platform. The value of NIP transactions in July stood at N22.4 trillion, while N22.1 trillion was recorded in August. In September, the value of the transactions jumped to N23.5 trillion and it further increased to N24.3 trillion in October. By November, the deals rose to N25.9 trillion. Expectedly, the value of deals over the platform in December was the highest monthly record for the year as transactions valued at N30.2 trillion were recorded in the month.

The increase in NIP transactions value for the year was a reflection of the surge in the volume of deals which rose by 70 per cent from 2 billion recorded in 2020 to 3.4 billion in 2021. NIBSS data for 2020 showed that the value of the NIP transaction grew by 50 per cent in the year to N158.1tn from N105.2tn in 2019. This was even as the volume of deals increased by 77 per cent from 1.14 billion in 2019 to 2.03 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, NIBSS data for Point of Sales (PoS) transactions also showed sustained growth as deals valued at N6.4 trillion were recorded between January and December 2021.

Compared with N4.7 trillion recorded in the same period of 2020, the channel recorded 36 per cent growth last year. The monthly breakdown shows that transactions valued at N489.2 billion were carried out over the PoS terminals across the country in January. In February, the value of PoS deals stood at N468.9 billion, while the figure rose to N531.4 billion in March.

In April, the value of PoS deals stood at N507 billion, while 503 billion was recorded in May. The PoS channel recorded transactions valued at N503 billion in June. NIBSS’ data for July, August, and September shows that N554 billion, N504 billion, and N556 billion deals were recorded in that order. The value of PoS deals in October stood at N552 billion, while it increased to N560 billion in November. In December, the value of transactions rose to N699.7 billion.

The volume of PoS transactions for the year also increased from 655 million in 2020 to 982 million in 2021. This represents a 50 per cent growth year-on-year. The transactions were carried out over 915,520 active terminals deployed by merchants across the country. This also showed that additional 456,230 new terminals were deployed in the last 12 months as the number of deployed machines stood at 459,290 as of December 2020. However, there is still a gap between the number of registered PoS and the number of deployed machines. According to NIBSS, a total of 1.3 million PoS machines had been registered as of December 2021, which showed that a total of 403,260 terminals are either yet to be deployed or have become inactive.

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