Nigerians Are Embracing eNaira — Emefiele

Godwin Emefiele, Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has said that Nigerians are gradually embracing the eNaira digital wallet which launched three months ago.

While answering questions from members of the press, Emefiele made this revelation after presenting the outcome of the two-day Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting which concluded on Tuesday in Abuja.

The Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) was kept at 11.5%, while the Cash Reserved Ratio (CRR) and Liquidity Ratio (LR) were kept at 27.5 percent and 30 percent, respectively.https://allnews.ng/news/monetary-policy-rate-stays-at-11-5-how-does-it-affect-you

On the eNaira digital wallet, the Governor informed the press and Nigerians in general that Person to Bank and Bank to Person transactions accounted for 90% of the eNaira wallet transactions. This development signifies a gradual growth of trust in the digital wallet system of the Naira.

"Since its launch about three months ago, Nigerians have continued to gradually adopt eNaira as a fast and reliable means of exchange.

"Transactions recorded range from P to P, that is, person to person; or person to merchant, P to M; bank to person; person to bank; bank to merchants; and merchants to bank.

"As you will notice, we spent the last three months observing and monitoring the system, addressing issues primarily related to initial onboarding," Emefiele explained.

He praised the speed at which transactions on the eNaira system have been going and promised that, for now, it will be free of charge to encourage more people to get onboarded.

He said that impregnable security measures to preserve the integrity of the system will always be given top priority since it is account-based and requires digital identity.

"We feel that you must have a BVN and you must have an account to be able to access it; we also find that this has created some kind of constraints on people about onboarding with BVN and the rest of them."

He informed Nigerians that the system was difficult to hack into as fraudsters had made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the system and that this was only possible with the inclusion of the BVN mandate into the system.

He said that the only challenge that the CBN was currently working hard to address was the issue of onboarding prospective users and that this was due to a mismatch in their BVN enrollment records.

He promised that the challenge had currently been resolved as the CBN, in conjunction with the commercial banks and the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NISS), were working on ways to simplify the updating process and account capturing.

He also assured that foreigners doing business in Nigeria or those abroad who have a valid BVN ID could now onboard the system as the application has made it easy for them.

He informed all that non-smartphone users could also enjoy the benefit of the eNaira as the Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy has made it easy to get onboarded through the eNaira USSD code by simply dialing 997.

At that point, Emefiele assured Nigerians that the eNaira wouldn’t only be a payment process but that work was on the way to developing a bouquet of products on the platform so as to make it more exciting and interactive.

The governor assured us that this development would be carried out in collaboration with Fintech companies.

He assured us that despite the slow start of the system, a test was on the way to make it a payment process on some e-Commerce platforms.