The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) has reported that 4.8 million new Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) were recorded in 2022, thereby raising the total number of registered BVNs in the country to 56.5 million.
The NIBSS had last year put the BVN volume at 51.7 million as at December 2021.
The latest data by the agency indicated that the 2022 BVNs represented a year-on-year dip as the database increased by 6 million from 45.7 million in December 2020 to 51.7 million while it also reported that active bank accounts in the country totalled 133.5 million as of December 2021.
Industry analysts believed that though the active bank accounts data for 2022 is yet to be published by the NIBSS, they projected that the figure would be higher than previous year’s, given the estimated gap between the BVN figures and the number of bank accounts in the country.
But then, they argued that if the multiple accounts that can be linked to a single BVN is considered, the disparity in the BVN figures and bank accounts may not be significant.
The NIBSS had, over the past few years, been encouraging bank customers on the need for BVN registration in view of benefits to them and the banking system.
Apart from providing bank account owners with a unique identity that can be verified across the Nigerian banking industry, the BVN also ensures that customers’ bank accounts are protected from hackers and fraudsters who are leveraging technology to access bank accounts and stealing from them.
The NIBSS clarified: “With the increasing incidents of compromise on conventional security systems (password and PIN), there is a high demand for greater security for access to sensitive or personal information in the Banking System.
“In recent times, biometric technologies have been used to analyze human characteristics as an enhanced form of authentication for real-time security processes”, it added.
