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By Chinwendu Obienyi
Arising from current cash crunch across the country, there are strong indications that banks are failing customers in their numbers and cannot handle the volume of transaction requests by them.
Daily Sun investigations can reveal that from the inception of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s cashless policy, customers have been made to bear the burden of the banking industry’s inefficiencies manifesting in the areas of electronic and mobile banking applications that have failed to meet the yearnings of most customers.
Faced with long hours of failed transactions, bank customers have now resorted to staying awake at midnight to make transactions, including pay TV subscriptions and purchase of airtime.
Daily Sun findings revealed that customers were left utterly frustrated yesterday as most of their banks’ mobile apps failed to work with hardly any cash available to withdraw from some banks.
Some observers who spoke to Daily Sun admitted that most of Nigerian banks platforms and infrastructure were not built for the heavy traffic they are now facing with the naira redesign policy and cash scarcity. They noted that the cashless policy has exposed the weaknesses of Nigerian banking infrastructure, leading to a loss of confidence on the part of customers.
A bank staff who spoke to Daily Sun, said banks were not adequately prepared for the policy, adding that the threshold infrastructure wasbuilt for a certain amount of transactions.
He said, ”There has not been enough money and even the new notes come once a week. You estimate one million transactions when building an app and then a threshold is set at that amount. But because everyone is using the app, the system is congested and maintaining it is not optimal and so the apps experiences some down time.
Hence the reason for the failed transactions. Hence we are managing our own e-payment channels. This is why we have told our customers to use QR codes to make transactions, the traffic is less there. This situation took us unawares and so we are trying our best to contain it. For cash, we are waiting because as it stands, there is much demand and less supply. Hence we ration our money to customers so that the money can go round”.
