23 million bank customers enrolled for BVN

A total of 23,345,964 million bank customers had obtained their Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) as at February 7, 2016.

The Director, Banking and Payment System Department, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. ‘Dipo Fatokun, who revealed thus in a paper he presented at a conference organised for members of the Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria (FICAN), in Ibadan, yesterday, also revealed that over 28,303,332 customers’ BVN, out of the existing 55,316,040 customers in all the banks in Nigeria, had been linked to their respective bank accounts.


According to Fatokun, a train-the-trainer session on installation of enrolment and verification devices at branches had been organised for banks’ staff.
He expressed satisfaction that the BVN initiative had started yielding the desired effects, with the reported elimination of 23,000 ghost workers at the federal government level.


Furthermore, Fatokun stated that despite the state of the economy, 2015 witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in the volume and value of transactions across all payment channels in the industry, compared to what was recorded in 2014.
Specifically, as at the end of 2015, while the volume of e-payment transactions was put at 162,598,740, value was put at N48,932,506,699,512.20; compared with a volume of 113,421,933, and value of N43,857,678,478,941.30  in 2014.
“The absence of a unique identifier in the Nigerian banking industry has been a major challenge, inhibiting the effectiveness of the know-your-customer (KYC) principle, with negative consequences on the growth of credit cards and other credit-related products.
“The bank verification number which is a centralised biometric identification system for the banking industry, was  launched by the bankers’ committee, to complement the existing means of customer identification, which include: the driver’s license; the international passport; the national identity card; and the permanent voter’s card,” he added.