News

Lagos strike highlights readiness for cashless system

January 24, 2012

The recent nationwide strike by the Nigerian Labour Congress to protest the removal of a government fuel subsidy was an indication of banks’ preparedness to implement a cashless drive by Central Bank of Nigeria, said a report at businessdayonline.com.

The report quoted Luqman Balogun, group director, E-banking, at United Bank of Africa who said, “We had a massive surge in the number of people who used our electronic channels during the nationwide strike action. Our ATMs, PoS terminals were up and running during the strike. We had a lot of customers who for the first time used our Internet banking platform to conduct financial transactions.”

Balogun said that UBA recorded 1 million transactions on its ATMs during the eight-day strike. UBA typically does five million ATM transactions monthly.

“We were able to keep our ATMs up and running,” Balogun said. “We even had an alert system in place to notify us when cash runs out at any ATM location. Our ATMs were also supporting cardless withdrawals where money can be sent to anyone … It was a test for us to see how effective our e-channels were and we came out tops.”