Nigerians are reportedly turning to the central bank’s new digital currency, the e-Naira, as cash becomes scarce in that country.
The currency in circulation took a nosedive from ₦3.2 trillion ($6.9 billion) in September to ₦1 trillion ($2.17 billion), as of Tuesday, Bloomberg reported.
The cash crunch had folks swiping their cards and tapping on their bank apps more. E-payment gateways saw an uptick in activity, but reports said a lot of those online transactions failed.
Banks couldn’t keep up with the e-payment stream, leaving many customers stranded or turning to the e-Naira for transactions.
The e-Naira was rolled out last October but didn’t receive increasing interest until the cash crunch caused by the Naira redesign policy.
The number of e-Naira wallets has skyrocketed more than twelvefold to 13 million since October, and the value of transactions has climbed 63% to ₦22 billion ($48 million) this year, according to Godwin Emefiele, the big boss at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Data showed that other non-bank e-channels like PoS transactions rose from ₦807.16 billion ($1.7 billion) in January to ₦883.45 billion ($1.9 billion) in February. Apps like OPay and Pocket also got a lot more love from customers who were eager to ditch the banks.
Ghana
Meanwhile, in Ghana eCedi has been touted as the panacea to a revolutionalised payment system, but it still remains in pilot and has still not gone mainstream.
There is a comprehensive eCedi Design Paper that spells out all the benefits to the various stakeholders – banks, fintech, non-banking financial institutions, government and consumers among others. But nothing concrete has happened since the launch of the design paper.
Apart from pointing out the technical and backend difference between eCedi and mobile, money, the regulator has not been able to draw a clear line between the two from the consumer point of view.
For instance, while the regulator claims eCedi is cheaper to use and would not be subjected to the kind of technical challenges that bedevils mobile money, they have not been able to clearly prove this is true. eCedi will make use of mobile money infrastructure and there will be a service fee like mobile money. Secondly, when there is a technical hitch eCedi will also be affected.
Meanwhile, the offline version of eCedi has its own disadvantages. If one loses the offline card/wallet, that is similar to losing physical cash, so the money is actually lost. But with mobile money, if one loses the phone that has the wallet, the money remains intact, so long as no one else has access to the owner’s PIN.
