Dormant mobile money operators (MMOs) in Nigeria may soon have their licenses withdrawn by the country’s apex bank, Central Bank of Nigeria, according to a report from Punch.
The move by the CBN is reportedly because mobile money services in the country is yet to achieve a 30% growth since 2012, despite granting licenses to over 18 mobile payment service providers.
“No other country in the world has such a high number of mobile money providers and that is why we are worried about the slow growth of mobile money services. Whereas in Kenya, through Mpesa, the mobile money service has continued to do so well”, the reporter’s quoted in the punch article.
Mobile money since its introduction into the Nigerian payments ecosystem in 2011 has refused to garner decent traction.
The executive secretary, Electronic Payment Providers Association of Nigeria, Mrs Regha Onajite thinks this may have been because of the lack of industry knowledge on the part of MMOs. “We must realise that a lot of mobile money operators didn’t know that mobile money is capital-intensive when they went to pick their licences,” she said in the report.
Source: Punchng
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