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CBN Targets 95% Financial Inclusion By 2024

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said it hopes to attain 95 percent financial inclusion for Nigeria in 2024, even as it says the nation has achieved 64.1 percent financial inclusion presently.

The Assistant Director, Financial Development, CBN, Paul Oluikpe, revealed this at an event in Lagos, where he noted that CBN had crashed the Know Your Customer service by commercial banks into different tiers.

His words: “We have a lot to do because we are currently at 64.1 per cent of inclusion and that is not where we need to be; we need to go beyond that figure to 95 per cent by 2024.

“For example, we have crashed the KYC condition, there is tier one, two, three, we have all of these segments to carter to people.”

According to him, some of those tiers required very minimum identity so it removes some of the bottlenecks and bureaucracies in terms of acquiring financial products and services signing up.

“Then you also know that CBN as a regulator, we are not responsible for the internal processes of banks and so, certain internal processes of financial service providers may engender delays in the way they sign up people.”

He, however, added that what the CBN was doing was to coordinate the industry and impress upon its stakeholders that it needed speed.

Each institution was unique and had its own challenges, he noted.

Oluikpe said to ensure financial inclusion, the apex bank also created awareness by using campaigns and also bringing stakeholders together.

“People are turning out for enlightenment. And also, we do what we call financial literacy to enlighten so that they will know how to utilise their phones for digital financial service because illiteracy is behind a lot of apathy on how to use digital financial services.

“So, it is this diversity of need that we are trying to feel. We know that no matter how good a strategy is, it requires fine-tuning,” he explained.

Currently, he said, it had a new financial inclusion strategy 3.0 and came up with a review to identify the gaps in the implementation of some of them.

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