The amount of money spent on mobile devices increased by N8.981 trillion between the first seven months of 2019 and the same time in 2022.
Data from the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) shows that they increased from N289.12 billion to N9.27 trillion. This is because the amount of transactions involving checks decreased by 31.42 percent, from N2.67 trillion in January to July 2019 to N1.83 trillion in the same period of 2022.
Due to COVID-19, the usage of mobile payment gateways started to increase significantly around 2020, while at about the same time, the use of checks started to drop.
Due to COVID, mobile transactions were on the rise, but the overall amount cleared by cheques started to fall.
The value of the cleared checks was N2.67 trillion in the first seven months of 2019, N1.86 trillion in 2020, N1.85 trillion in 2021, and N1.83 trillion in 2022 before continuing to fall.
According to the NIBSS’s “Instant Payments – 2020 Annual Statistics,” mobile devices dominated electronic payment in 2020, accounting for 43% of all transactions. Additionally, 78% of all transfer transactions were carried out utilizing mobile devices, while 35% of transactions using USSD.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Prof. Umar Danbatta, a benefit of financial service riding on telecom infrastructure was the provision of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data as it had brought ease to financial transactions.
Within the time under review, the number of active GSM subscribers increased from 173.63 million in January 2019 to 206.08 million in June 2022.
In its mobile money industry report for 2021, GSMA, the global body for telecommunication companies, noted that “while 2020 saw unparalleled challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the mobile money industry witnessed strong efforts in striving towards cashless societies, entering strategic partnerships to expand the horizons of digital payments and developing new and robust interoperable payment systems.”
