The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has directed Commercial Banks and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in the country to henceforth honour all end-to-end bulk payments or transfers request issued by their customers.
According to a circular issued and signed by the Director of Payments System Management Department of the CBN, Musa Jimoh, the requests will only be honoured for customers with a detailed breakdown of the accounts that receive the credits retained in the custody of the sender’s banks.
The recent development is in reaction to difficulties associated with the processing of bulk transfers by banks and payment service providers. The difficulty is majorly due to the fact that the participating institutions (banks and PSPs) only pass a single debit entry through the initiating customer’s account and multiple credits to beneficiaries without adequate records of the credit entries in their system. This distorts the audit trail and hampers transparency.
As a way of alleviating these difficulties, the CBN directed that: ‘’All banks and PSPs are required to ensure full compliance with this requirement and all other payment system regulations.’’
Naijabusiness.com.ng gathered that this is one out of the many recent directives issued by the apex bank, all geared towards ensuring stability of the financial system and support growth of the domestic economy.