When Banks, Telcos Trade Blames For Naira Redesign Imbroglio

It's no longer news that the ongoing Naira redesign project has brought untold hardship to Nigerians judging by long queues in banks, fighting, the high-handedness of POS operators, etc. It's also not news that neither the CBN, the commercial banks nor the telcos are accepting responsibility for the failures of online banking activities resting directly or indirectly on the Naira redesign.

Sequel to all the ongoing hullabaloos, we are forced to reassess this logjam in light of common sense analyses. 

Nigerian banks claim that they have invested over N100 billion in setting up and maintaining cutting-edge electronic channels over the past few years as part of an ongoing commitment to seamless customer experience and real-time digital financial transactions. 

However, the telecom operators are still of the view that the banks probably do not have the capacity for full-blown digital banking.

With the influx of unconfirmed reports after a recent Bankers Committee meeting, Bank CEOs claimed that the frustrating online transactions and network failures in their member banks were not caused by internal but external glitches. 

Lately, there have been massive complaints regarding severe online transaction failures in the banks since the enforcement of redesigned naira policy by the CBN. 

The banks, however, have denied responsibility for this poor showing.

Naturally, with banks' denials, uninformed customers are tempted to transfer the blames to the doorsteps of the telecom operators. 

But then, as also expected, the telcos, in their own swift reactions, have averred that if the statements credited to the bank CEOs were true, they were speaking “tongue in cheek”.

While speaking through their umbrella body, the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators in Nigeria, ALTON, they said it was preposterous to think that all the operators will develop technical issues which will affect only bank transactions while other activities that do not have to do with banking are going on smoothly, including voice calls, data, and multimedia services. 

The group advised the banks to look inward and solve their problems and not to issue statements that would infer that their problems are caused by the telecom operators.

Head, of Operations of the Association, Gbolahan Awonuga told Vanguard: “We have no problem from our end that could have affected bank transactions and for now, we do not even take any action on the huge USSD debt they owe us.

"So, we have no technical issues that can affect banking operations.

"What I suspect is that, perhaps, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN’s recent decision to push a cashless economy caught the banks unawares.

"Apparently, not being able to carry out physical cash transactions, the banks pushed their customers to the Unstructured Supplementary Services Data, USSD platform, and the volume of transactions outweighed the capacity they have.

“The only solution is for the banks to increase their USSD capacity and properly deploy the right facilities for full-blown digital or online banking” he added. 

The Association of Corporate Affairs Managers of Banks (ACAMB) had in a statement on the Naira redesign, revealed that “from internet banking to mobile apps, Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), Point of Sales (PoS) merchants, mobile wallets, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes, agents and digital franchises among others; not less than 80 per cent of Nigerians now enjoy one form of digital or cashless transaction or another, powered by investments of over N100 billion by Nigerian Banks”.

However, ACAMB is assuring Nigerians that the entire banking sector is working with the apex Bank and other stakeholders to urgently address constraints in the implementation and ensure that Nigerians suffer no untoward pains in the transition process and urged the Nigerian banking public to exercise patience and not resort to any untoward behaviour against Bank staff or banking facilities.

Conclusion

Like in all other cases of life, this situation projects the complex nature of humans when it comes to things of personal interests and arising conflicts. 

It's pretty difficult at this point to tell who's right or wrong between the telcos and the banks.

However, there's always a place for the operational baseline to be reviewed in downtime situations.

It takes the telcos to review their baseline records before the transaction traffics that trailed the Naira redesign and perform some tweaks if necessary.

It also takes the banks as well to reference their baseline records for the same period and compare datasheets.

In both cases, the comparison results should make it clear if either or both of the telcos and banks should beef up infrastructural capacities to accommodate the new normal.

Moreover, it might even become necessary for the banks to engage their software engineers to also re-evaluate the banking technology space and determine what needs to be done differently, especially in terms of USSD capacities.

If everyone is happily rolling up their sleeves, this situation should not linger at all.