According to data collected from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc webpage (NIBSS), Nigerians used Point of Sale terminals 3.03 million times daily to process payments in the first two months of 2022, with the use of cheques down to a six-year low.
Nigerians utilized PoS services 178.99 million times in the first two months of 2022, up 25.59 percent from the 142.51 million times in the same period of 2021, according to the data.
The total amount of these transactions was N1.15 trillion, up 19.76 percent over the N958.14 billion in transactions completed in the same time in 2021.
According to the NIBSS, the country has 986,252 registered PoS units. It went on to say that 955,234 units had been deployed and were in use.
According to data from the NIBSS portal, while the use of point-of-sale as a payment gateway has grown, the acceptance of checks has dropped to a six-year low.
Cheques were used as payment gateways 669,218 times in the first two months of 2022, a 15.39 percent decline from the 772,249 times they were used in the same period in 2021.
In the corresponding period of 2017, cheques were used 1,721,295 times; in the corresponding period of 2018, they were used 1,669,825 times; they were used 1,352,688 times in the corresponding period of 2019; and 1,222,721 times in the corresponding period of 2020.
According to the data, as the volume of usage dropped, the value also did. In 2017, N967.89bn worth of cheque was processed in the first two months of the year, this figure dropped to 876.16bn within the first two months of 2018.
In the first two months of 2019, N775.58 billion in cheques were processed. In 2020, it was N726.25 billion. In the first two months of 2021, a N525.65 billion cheque was processed, which reduced to N497.09 billion in the first two months of 2022.
Mr Ebenezer Onyeagwu, the Group Managing Director of Zenith Bank Plc, recently stated that since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, banks have seen an increase in client use of electronic banking.
The NIBSS stated in its ‘Instant Payments – 2020 Annual Statistics’ that the COVID-19 epidemic altered the e-payments scene and hastened the use of instant payments as more people moved to electronic channels for funds exchange in the aftermath of government.
