The introduction and use of different electronic payment systems by the Central Bank of Nigeria helped curb incidences of fraud in banking transactions in 2015, the CBN said.
CBN’s director of Banking and Payments System Department of the CBN, Dipo Fatokun, said the actual loss as a result of fraud in bank transactions dropped from N6.2 billion recorded in 2014 to about N2.3 billion in 2015 in an interview with Premium Times.
It would be recalled that the apex bank recently introduced various payment systems, including the bank customers’ Biometric Verification Numbers (BVN); fraud prevention strategies; Treasury Single Account (TSA); agency banking and electronic-dividend payment project with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
According to Mr. Fatokun, cases of attempted fraud fell from N7.8 billion to N4.4 billion in 2015, although the volume of such cases jumped astronomically from 1,461 to 10,743 during the same year.
He explained that the various systems have helped significantly in protecting bank customers by addressing issues of identity theft and fraud exposure, thus strengthening the Nigerian banking system.
“The significant drop in the incidences of fraud in the banking system was as a result of the successful deployment of various mobile payment systems and vigorously enforced by the CBN in 2015.”
“An analysis of the reduction in fraud incidence in 2015 made fraud rate in Nigeria less than that of Europe as a whole, and indeed Portugal, which boasts of the least fraud rate in Europe,” he added.
