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Amechi Ogbonna and Omodele Adigun, Kaduna
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, (NDIC) Alhaji Umaru Ibrahim, has reassured of the Corporation’s commitment to continue to partner with different strategic stakeholders in the financial services industry to deepen the Deposit insurance services practice and financial system stability in Nigeria.
Ibrahim who spoke at the NDIC annual workshop for Business Editors and Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria (FICAN) in Kaduna, yesterday on the theme: “COVID-19 & FinTech Disruption: Opportunities & Challenges for Banking System Stability and Deposit Insurance” said that the risks, implications and opportunities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and FinTech on the Nigerian banking sector and the global financial system as a whole were quite huge and needed to be tackled through stakeholder collaboration.
“The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant disruptions to social and economic activities has had negative consequences on all nations across the world. The threat of recession, increased national debt, increase in non-performing loans and potential financial crisis has put pressure on regulators to reassess their supervisory activities to strengthen their capabilities to address these challenges and forestall financial crisis.”
On Fintech, Ibrahim noted that despite its promising innovation and economic growth through disruption of traditional finance, Fintech disruptive financial services such as chip-based debit/credit cards, mobile and web-based payments, cloud computing also pose major challenges to the regulatory paradigm.
Quoting McKinsey & Company, he said Nigeria is now home to over 200 fintech standalone companies, plus a number of fintech solutions offered by banks and mobile network operators as part of their product portfolio. Between 2014 and 2019, Nigeria’s bustling fintech scene raised more than $600 million in funding, attracting 25 percent ($122 million) of the $491.6 million raised by African tech startups in 2019 alone—second only to Kenya, which attracted $149 million.
