The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday released a report which showed that Nigerian banks closed 234 branches and 649 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in 2020.
This led to a decline in the country’s Financial Access Score (FAS) from 4.78 in 2019 to 4.44 last year.
According to the report, the international community uses two FAS indicators to monitor the Target 8.10 of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aims at strengthening the capacity of domestic financial institutions to expand access to banking and financial services.
The two FAS indicators, according to IMF, are Number of Commercial Bank Branches per 100,000 Adults and Number of ATMs per 100,000 Adults.
It added that Nigeria recorded declines in these two critical FAS indicators and 12 other indicators among the 64 indicators measured by the FAS.
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The report stated that in terms of the Number of ATMs per 100,000 Adults, the country’s Financial Access score fell to 17.19 in 2020 from 16.14 in 2020.
The reduction was due to a decline in the number of ATMs in Nigeria by 649 to 18,810 in 2020 from 19,459 in 2019, IMF says.
Also, the Number of ATMs per 1,000 km2 in Nigeria fell to 20.65 in 2020 from 21.36 in 2019.
