The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement Systems (NIBSS) on Thursday unveiled Nigeria’s maiden national payment card, AfriGo, in furtherance of their collective drive towards fully digitalizing the nation’s financial system.
The AfriGo card, which will function like other international payment cards, according to the partners, is designed to deepen the apex bank’s financial inclusion efforts, reduce the use of foreign cards for transactions and by implication, save the country of the foreign exchange spending on those cards.
In his speech during the virtual event organized to introduce the AfriGo in Abuja, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, explained the card was designed to cater for local peculiarities that the existing foreign cards do not have.
According to him, with the launch of the AfriGo card, Nigeria has joined countries like Russia, China, Turkey, and India which have developed their local cards for seamless transactions.
While noting that the use of the national card will not prevent the use of the existing international cards but will create more options for Nigerians, Emefiele listed some of its benefits of the digital payment card as including, creating opportunity to integrate the informal sector of the economy into the financial system and reducing the cost of card production for Nigerian banks and forex savings by Nigerian banks on production of foreign cards.
He expatiated: “The National Domestic Card avails us the sovereignty of our data. Secondly, it comes at lower costs, and thirdly, the issue of foreign exchange.
“At this time when foreign exchange challenges persist globally, it is important for me to say that we have come up with this card to ensure that all card online transactions will now effective immediately, begin to go on the Nigerian National Domestic System.
“At some point in the next few weeks, I am sure that the CBN will come up with the cut-off. All domestic card transactions that will be conducted in Nigeria will have to be through Nigerian Domestic Cards.
“Your existing cards are fine. You can continue using them but given that charges by foreign cards are in dollars, we will no longer pay dollars for the charges on those cards.
“We will only pay dollars for charges on transactions that are done outside Nigeria. NIBSS, the CBN, and Nigerian banks will work together to see how to segregate those transactions. To ensure that we pay fees or charges for international transactions that are conducted on both domestic cards, Visa or Master Cards, as they are known today.
“We will bar domestic charges from the Nigerian foreign exchange market at some point in the very near future”, the CBN governor added.
Elaborating on the benefits of the AfriGo card to the economy, the apex bank’s Deputy Governor and Chairman of NIBSS, Aisha Ahmad, said that with the implementation of the National Domestic Card Scheme, the industry will reap potential benefits, including improved transaction security, better pricing opportunities, reduced demand for FX and less pressure on the Naira, locally relevant partnerships and offerings developing local skills in card and payment space.
She listed other benefits of the card as a boost to financial inclusion, value retention, flexible and innovative scale, source of national pride.
Ahmad disclosed that based on the global card ownership statistics report, the Nigerian adult population owns about 32% and 3% of Debit and Credit cards respectively.
The NIBSS’ Chairman elaborated: “This ranks Nigeria as the 75th in the world in debit card to population ratio and 114th in the world in credit card to population ratio.
“Nigeria has a low card-to-population ratio when it is benchmarked globally, and this has a major impact on the government’s drive to aggressively boost financial inclusion”, the banker added.
She disclosed that AfriGo was developed by AfriGopay Financial Services Limited, an affiliate of NIBSS licensed by the CBN for digital products which is also responsible for deploying and managing the National Domestic Card Scheme for Nigeria.
