Babatunde Irukera, the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Council (FCCPC), has stated that the agency lacked the ability to help aggrieved bank customers, citing the enactment of the Bank and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA) 2020.
In an interview on Arise TV, monitored by BizWatch Nigeria, Irukera explained that the Act has limited the power of the council on the Nigerian banking industry in dealing with bank customers’ complaints against their banks.
According to the FCCPC chief, what that law did was to exclude the council’s Act from the banking industry, meaning that the oversight work it does with resolving complaints in the financial institutions became limited.
His words: “So, essentially, the real statutory platform for resolving that banking complains is now the central bank exclusively. However, because banking constitutes the second largest complains we receive, what we have done at the FCCPC is to continue to do the work in the banking sector based on an understanding that withdrawing that channel would absolutely be chaotic.
“And so, we’re struggling with having the statutory tools to deal with the banking sector as we used to. And one of the results of this is that we don’t have the visibility that we would have to be able to contribute to policy and execution of policy in a way that would truly and fully capture what we know based on our experience in dealing with banking customers and what we understand the landscape of the industry to be.”
