Banks ready to insure online transactions
Nigerian bank customers, who entertain fears of transacting business online, have been assured by the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) that very soon banking transactions will be fully insured and risks associated with them underwritten by insurance companies.
Mr. Ade Shonubi, Managing Director of NIBSS, briefing journalists on the development of the project, said NIBSS and banks have approached insurance companies and operators, who have accepted to underwrite the risks associated with financial transactions.
He informed that four banks and three telecommunications firms have already agreed to work on the project, adding that they are awaiting final approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) early next month to kick-start the project.
According to him, the insurance cover would also include transactions done via mobile money channels, like the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which is a global system for mobile (GSM) communication technology used to send text and payment between mobile phones.
“We want to make money transfers as simple as possible, especially for USSD where we set a maximum limit to start. We have gone to the insurance industry and they are willing to underwrite the transaction risks. So, hopefully, we would start this idea of insurance cover for financial transactions by next month. We are waiting for final approval from CBN.
“We have four banks that are already tested and ready to go, and also three telecommunications operators. Next month, we start a pilot. We have a brand that is agreed on and we would make the noise”, Shonubi said.
He said the willingness to underwrite is not in doubt because: “Everybody who uses it has a bank account. Every bank account has Bank Verification Number (BVN). So, if you do transactions, we would pay you, but when we investigate and find out that you are a fraudster, we would blacklist you,” he said.
He said with the new transaction cover, banking fraud will be drastically reduced and bank customers involved in fraudulent transactions would be blacklisted.
“The thing about this is that even if there is fraud, money must come from somewhere and go somewhere and where that happens, the transactions will be tracked and fraudster will be blacklisted. But if the complainant lied, he will be blacklisted from doing banking transactions”, Shonubi explained.
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