CBN Targets 95% Financial Inclusion, Removes Bottlenecks For Account Opening
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said it has set a target of 95 percent in its radical effort to bring most Nigerians into the financial system by 2024.
To this end, the apex bank said it has lowered banks’ official requirements for know-your-customer (KYC) which are a precondition for bank account opening in Nigeria.
However, the apex claimed it had already achieved 64.1 percent financial inclusion, pointing out its has a lot more to do to achieve its target of 95 percent inclusion by next year.
Speaking at an event in Lagos, CBN Assistant Director, of Financial Development, Paul Oluikpe, disclosed that the apex bank had crashed the Know-Your-Customer requirements by commercial banks into different tiers to make it easier for the ordinary Nigerian.
“We are currently at 64.1 percent of financial inclusion and that is not where we need to be; we need to go beyond that figure to 95 percent by 2024.
“We have crashed the KYC condition into diverse segments; there is tier one, two, three, we have all of these segments to carter to different people,” the CBN director stated.
He added that “Some of those tiers required very minimum identity so it removes some of the bottlenecks and bureaucracies that you have in terms of acquiring financial products and services signing up,” said Oluikpe.
He however pointed out that there is a limit to what the apex bank can do as a regulator.
“As a regulator, we are not responsible for the internal processes of banks and so, certain internal processes of financial service providers may engender delays in the way they sign up people,” Oluikpe noted.
He added that what the CBN was doing was to coordinate the industry and impress upon its stakeholders the urgent need to speed up.
Currently, he said, it had a new financial inclusion strategy 3.0 and came up with a review to identify the gaps in the implementation of some of them.
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