By Chukwumah Kelechukwu
Transaction failures at Point of Sales hit 15 percent early morning Saturday, April 2019, a sign that electronic payments facilitated by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) during the Easter celebration could be marred by huge failures.
As early as 8:11am local time, 8, 595 transaction failures had been recorded out of 55, 275 total volumes, representing 15.38 percentage failure rate with average processing time at 2minutes, 21 seconds.
This sharply contrasted with the assurance by NIBSS that the platform would not record low time during the Easter celebrations which started with Good Friday.
The NIBSS platform collapsed on December 24, 2018 owing to pressures huge volume of transactions in the run up to the Christmas festivity in which about 25 percent of transactions failed on that day. As at the point of collapse, volume of all Point Of Sales (POS) transactions on that day was 31.9 million.
NIBSS, which is said to have found away around system failure, according to its spokesperson, Lilian Phido, said the problem of December 24 which was occasioned by the persistent deluge of Point Of Sales (POS) transaction failures and non-reversal of wrongly debited transactions had been addressed.
“What the industry did is to extend the timeout period for a typical transaction. For instance, a typical transaction could take few seconds before it times out. That timeout period has been extended,” Phido said over telephone.
Read Also: NIBSS Rules Out Transaction Failures During Easter.
InsideBusiness’ analysis of data from NIBSS’s POS Live feed between 8am and 9am today Saturday 20 April indicates that transaction rate was rising by leaps and bounds, much typical of a festive period in Nigeria.
In about 45minutes, transaction volume rose to 77, 754 as of 8:45am, up from 55, 275 recorded as of 8:11am while failure rates which stood at 11,018 dropped by percentage to 14.17 percent against 15.38 percent earlier recorded.
By 9:12am, total volume of transactions had hit staggering 93, 732 with failed volumes standing at 12, 732 representing 13.58 percentage failure rate.
Pointer to today’s failure rate was seen in the platform records since the beginning of 2019.
Rate of transaction failure, particularly on POS, has been on the increase since March 2019 with minimum average of 30,000 failed transactions on a typically bad day.
POS failure analysis obtained from NIBSS showed that transaction trend which increasingly deteriorated since January, 2019 worsened as of April 5.
NIBSS is the switch platform that connects every other party to inter-switch to execute a financial transaction. For instance, when a mobile money firm initiates a transaction at agent point, the signal would hit NIBSS first, and NIBSS will communicate Interswitch which processes the agent’s request to the acquirer bank.
The Interswitch picks up the money from the banker and return it to the mobile money operator’s agent for settlement. Thus, any time NIBSS operating system goes down, the entire electronic payment system goes down too, and no transactions get processed.
Phido said that all hands were on deck to improve the situation, stressing that even the Central Bank was working very closely with the entire industry to ensure the systems are back to normalcy.
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