The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has just given a go ahead to a subsidiary of Interswitch Group, Interswitch Financial Inclusion Services (IFIS) with a mandate to grow an active Agent Network of 150,000 in 4 years.
Last December, Interswitch Transnational, Africa’s leading integrated payment and transaction processing company another subsidary of the group achieved a land mark feet with first Bank Nigeria when it helped the Bank to be the first financial institution in Nigeria to achieve a volume of N100 million transactions in a month.
Divisional CEO, IFIS, Mike Ogbalu had this to say about the mandate:
“We are very happy to confirm that CBN has granted the required authorization for us to operate as a Super Agent. This is an ambitious undertaking and with Quickteller Paypoint, we seek to become the largest and most used agent network in Nigeria by YE 2016. This is the beginning of what promises to be a new chapter in Nigerian financial services and our national development as a whole new frontier of commercial activities will be opened up through Quickteller Paypoint.
We want to thank our numerous partners and stakeholders and the CBN for trusting our vision enough to give us the opportunity to unlock the value of agency banking and financial inclusion services in Nigeria. Issues around non-robust agent management platform, poor liquidity management, lack of agent interoperability, low agent value proposition, poor investment in agent branding and support have all been duly identified and would be addressed effectively. The hard work starts now but we are going to relish every moment.”
Interswitch is an electronic transaction switching and payment processing company with a business footprint that covers the provision of shared, integrated message broker solutions for financial transactions, e-commerce, telecoms value-added services and e-billing in the Nigerian environment.
Curated from Vanguard
