The Central Bank of Nigeria is pushing for broader use of “eNiara” as it is set to introduce the use of USSD for transacting the country’s official digital currency the e-naira. This was announced by the Governor of the Central bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele during the grand finale of the eNaira Hackathon which took place in the nation’s capital Abuja. In his speech, Emefiele stated that about 8 million users are targeted and the first phase of the launch focused on bank users and tech-savvy people, while the second phase will be geared at financial inclusion where digital currencies will be part and parcel of everyday human life. And this has been made easier and more realistic through the use of USSDs. In his words he stated:
“We don’t have a choice but to live with the fact that we are now in a digital economy. In a digital space where the use of cash will dissipate to almost zero and the use of digital currency will increase and will now become part of our lives.”
“The second phase of the project has begun and is intended to drive financial inclusion by onboarding the unbanked and the underserved users leveraging offline channels. Hence, greater success is envisioned for the project with phase two expected to deliver more gains with the target of eight million users based on estimation using the diffusion of innovation model.”
After stating this, he further reassured Nigerians that in a week, both banked and unbanked users will get access to eNaira services on their phones just by dialing “*997#.” In addition to this, both merchants and consumers with bank accounts will get access to NIBSS instant payment NIP to transfer and receive eNaira to any designated bank account of their choice. This will of no doubt foster integration of the eNaira with the existing national payment infrastructure.
Still in his speech, Emefiele gave a little stat that eNaira has recorded since its inception. He said:
“Already, the digital currency has reached 840,000 downloads, 270,000 active wallets comprising over 252,000 consumer wallets and 17,000 merchant wallets.”
“In addition, the volume and value of transactions on the platform has been remarkable, reaching above 200,000 and N4bn respectively.”
The first Central Bank Digital Currency in Nigeria eNaira is always evolving to solve one problem or the other. According to Dr. Khalipha Nuhu, Officer, Information Technology Department CBN, these adjustments on the eNaira is to proffer solutions to the problems that are being highlighted by the people and further encourage its adoption. Speaking on this he said:
“In terms of the challenges, there have been a lot of people asking us, you introduced eNaira, where can you spend this money? It is not just about having a wallet. All this feedback has been taken. We are doing a lot of work onboarding merchants, that is, where people can go and spend this eNaira. We have redesigned the wallet to improve the technology and added more features and adoption is very important. We’ve collaborated with Africa Fintech Technology to run a Hackathon, which is a way of sourcing ideas to solve societal and business problems. So, that’s one of the major things we now do in terms of adoption”
According to Emefiele, the eNaira is expected to check a few boxes in the nation’s economy. Some of these are the fostering of financial inclusion, the support of poverty alleviation, the facilitation of diaspora remittances to support a resilient payments ecosystem, the improvement of the availability and usability of central bank’s money, the reduction of the cost of processing cash, and the improvement of the efficiency of cross-border payments.
