Following over three years of reconciliatory mediations by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over the USSD debt owed Mobile National Operators (MNOs) by banks, the lenders have finally settled the telecom companies with the payment of the accumulated USSD N160 billion debt.
A Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), is a communication protocol used by mobile phone users to interact with their mobile network operator’s computer systems. The data is the means by which the banks and their customers are using to send SMS, MMS and exchange other critical information about their accounts on a real-time basis.
The Chief Executive Officer of MTN Nigeria, Karl Toriola, confirmed the settlement of the debt when he featured on Arise TV to speak on the company’s first-quarter 2025 financial results, which indicated that company posted over N1 trillion in revenue earnings during the quarter.
Toriola, in his clarification during the programme confirmed that the lingering faceoff between the telcos and the banks subsided following the payments by the banks.
He said: “I can confirm that the matter has been fully resolved. We have received payments in full. Special thanks to the CBN, NCC, the banks, and other stakeholders that intervened in the matter.”
It would be recalled that the USSD debt had been a major source of bickering between the banks and telcos for about five years.
For instance, in the third quarter of 2024, the MNOs had threatened to withdraw their services over the huge USSD debt, totalling about N200 billion by then, and necessitated the interventions of the NCC and the CBN that culminated in an agreement by the parties on the payment of the debt.
By November 2024, the NCC disclosed that the USSD debt had dropped to about N160 billion. However, earlier this year, when it seemed the banks were not ready to comply with the terms of the agreement with the telcos on the debt payment, the commission directed the telcos to withdraw the USSD services from 18 banks still defaulting in the payment of their debts.
Industry experts believe that later the circular jointly signed by the NCC and CBN which articulated the payment terms had finally compelled the banks to settle the N160 billion debt as confirmed by the MTNN’s CEO yesterday.