Nairametrics| Mobile, Internet and POS transactions in Nigeria remained on a growth path in 2016 despite the recession and the disruptive forex regime. In a year where most Nigerians lost jobs, cut down on demand for consumer goods and faced rising cost of goods and services, usage of these platforms to consummate transactions rose nearly two folds.
Volume of transactions
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Key takeout from volume of transactions
- Nigerians rely more on ATM for transactions, particularly payments. Recording as high as 61 million ATM transactions a month, Nigerians feel more comfortable using ATM machines than any other payment platform for transactions.
- Understandably, most the transactions are cash withdrawals but the message here is clear to vendors. ATM transactions should be used for a lot more than cash withdrawals.
- Cheque transactions are getting extinct. This is perhaps a combination of CBN Cash-less policy as well as the advent of fund transfer gateways such as NIBBS and NEFT.
- NIBSS for example, has towered above cheque transactions in usability and adoption.
- We also observed the rise of POS, Mobile and Internet web enabled transactions. All three recorded year on year growth in transaction volume of over 100%.
- POS transactions for example, peaked at 8.9 million transactions by December 2016 compared to just over 3 million in January 2016.
- Nigerians appear to have also increased their adoption of mobile payment gateways for facilitating transactions. Mobile pay is now as high as 4.4 million transactions a month.
- Internet web has more room for growth even though transaction volume has nearly tripled to 1.7 million a month.
Value of transactions
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Key highlights
- NIBSS dominates transaction value with over N4 trillion worth of transactions monthly.
- NIBSS was at par with cheque transactions at just over N570 billion a month in 2012.
- Cheque transactions tallied a transaction value of under N500 billion in 2016. In fact, the highest transaction value for cheques was sometime in 2012 at about N862 billion.
- Monthly ATM transactions by value also hit a year high N472 billion in December 2017 as more and more Nigerians rely on it for cash withdrawals.
- The peak in ATM transaction by value is also in tandem with volume of transactions
- Interestingly, mobile app transaction value is toe to toe with the value of transactions for POS gateways. POS transaction value was about N80 billion in February 2017 compared to mobile transactions at about N90 billion.
- Considering that POS transactions by volume is more than double that of mobile transactions.
- Internet web transaction value is still at about N15 billion per month.
