By Foluso Adelaja, Editor, THE STATEPOST
Godwin Emefiele, Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria
The use of cheques as means of payments in Nigeria is on the wane and may be gradually fading out as electronic transactions take a firm ascendancy in business transactions in the country, THE STATEPOST can now authoritatively reveal.
Spanning a decade now, Point of Sales (POS) and other forms of electronic payments have continued to take the lead over paper transactions to show Nigerians increasing preference for paperless transactions.
According to the recently released record of the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS), business transactions by means of cheques continued to show a graphical decline year in, year out.
The NIBSS data for instance showed a huge drop in the value of cheque transactions between the year 2019 and 2020 by 26.6 percent.
The year 2020 recorded a value of N3.6 trillion cheque transactions as against N4.5 trillion record of 2019 which represented a 26.6 percent decline in the use of cheques as payment option.
The record goes to show that the drop in transactions derived from a total of 4.9 million deals in the year 2020 which was another huge drop of 37 percent when compared to a total of 7.8 million deals recorded in 2019.
The NIBSS data showed that on year to year basis for over eleven years now, the value of cheque transactions had been on a steady decline since its last time high of N17.8 trillion of the year 2019.
The unceasing plunge was markedly noted in 2017 with a record of N5.4 trillion transactions in comparison to 2018 with a record of N5.03 trillion and by 2019 it had plummeted to N4.5 trillion transactions.
The unceasing decline became a total crash last year as the figure went down by close to a trillion naira.
The total decline of 2020 was aggravated by the one month suspension of cheque transactions by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) during the Covid-19 lockdown.
However, the decade long decline in the use of cheque as instrument of transactions became the gains of various forms of electronic platforms as marked rise in the volume and value of transactions in POS, Mobile Transfer, NIBSS Instant Payment, E-bills And others were recorded.
The NIBSS record showed the value of POS deals in 2020 to have reached an all-time high of N4.7 trillion, a 46 percent increase over the N3.2 trillion value of 2019.
In volume term, the number of POS transactions also increased from 438 million in 2019 to 635 million in 2020 and this represents a 49.5 percent growth.
