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> Posted by Prateek Shrivastava, Global Director, Channels & Technology, Accion

The National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria passed the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Act in 2007. The Act included provisions for the creation of the CBN to ensure monetary stability, issuing and maintaining legal tender, and promoting the implementation of best practices including the use of electronic payment systems in all banks across Nigeria.

In the same year, the CBN developed the Financial System Strategy 2020 wherein the need for electronic financial services (amongst many other reforms) to make Nigeria a competitive economy was identified. Since 2008, the CBN has been extremely active in developing and implementing guidelines and frameworks to support the digitization of financial services (for example, all banks and microfinance banks need to have core banking systems, and the use of ATMs is governed) including mobile money and agent banking. The Guidelines on Mobile Money Services in Nigeria were approved and published in June 2009. Most recently, the CBN has also released a licensing framework for “super agents” that banks and other regulated financial services providers can use to bring services to the markets and streets in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s mobile money market hosts about two dozen licensed mobile money operators (MMOs) that include banks and others, which, in spite of their array, have proven inadequate in terms of country coverage and active adoption.

In the recent words of Dipo Fatokun, Director of the Banking and Payment System Department of the CBN, “Expectations of mobile money [in Nigeria] have not fully been met.” Annual mobile money transactions in the country in 2014 exceeded N5 billion (US$25 million), while in Kenya and Tanzania total annual transactions in 2013 were US$22 billion and US$18 billion.

A report from EFINA published in 2014, a full five years after the CBN guidelines for mobile money were put in place, shows that only 800,000 Nigerian adults currently use mobile money, representing less than one percent of the adult population. Today, even arguably the most successful entity, Pagatech Nigeria with its innovative use of technology and strong management team, is advertised sporadically on the streets of Lagos and even less further afield. Awareness is low and therefore adoption is low.

In my opinion, this lack of progress can be attributed to two key issues:
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