The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Thursday, in Akure, announced plans to accommodate physically challenged persons in its cashless policy drive.
Ikechukwu Nwaoha, the bank’s Deputy Director, Consumer and Financial Protection Department, said this in a paper he delivered at the 17th seminar for finance correspondents and business editors.
The paper was entitled, “Issues, Challenges and Consumer Protection in a Cashless Economy”.
According to him, the CBN will soon introduce graphics moderated automated teller machines (ATMs) to facilitate the participation of physically challenged persons in e-transaction.
Nwaoha said that the illiterate populace would also be able to use the facility which, he added, would take care of all the concerns they had raised on the cashless policy at various seminars.
On consumer protection in a cashless economy, the deputy director said that the CBN had taken care of this by upgrading the consumer and financial protection division to a department.
He explained that upgrading the division to a department was to strength its capacity address issues concerning consumers.
Nwaoha also said that the upgrade would boost confidence in automated financial services and contribute toward the CBN’s plans for a consumer help desk at its headquarters and branches nationwide.
He disclosed that complaints about ATMs and Point of Sales (PoS) terminals constituted about 99 per cent of the grievances reported against financial institutions.
According to him, the low level of consumers’ enlightenment on product suitability, inadequate understanding of the security implications of divulging personal information and non-automated reversal of PoS, were other issues.
He said that the CBN had made efforts to eliminate the challenges associated with the policy, especially those that were technologically driven.
The deputy director said that one of such efforts was the issuance of a circular requesting financial institutions to expand their ATM help desks to accommodate consumers’ complaints.
Nwaoha also said that the CBN had been conducting periodic compliance checks on banks to ensure what he described as effective and functional compliance.
He listed the other efforts to include the introduction of Nigerian unified bank account numbers (NUBAN), as well as account numbers which facilitated electronic fund transfer among banks and reduced clearing errors.
Source:Daily Times