In its effort to transform Nigeria's financial sector, Nigerian Interbank Settlement Scheme (NISS) disclosed on Friday 26th July 2019 that about 38.5 million bank accounts have been linked to the Bank Verification Number.
In a figure released by the NISS, Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) in Nigeria witnessed 1.7 million new BVN registrations in the past five months. This according to the NISS, represents 31 per cent of the total number of bank accounts, and 53 per cent of the total number of active bank accounts in Nigeria.
According to the data, the total number of bank accounts as of June 2019 was 122.37 million while the number of active bank accounts was 72.97 million.
The Biometric Identification Number (BVN) was introduced to address identity theft, reduce exposure to fraud and enhance the banking industry chances of being able to fish out blacklisted customers, among others.
More so, the data released indicated that about 29.28 million Current Accounts (CA) were opened by bank customers while Savings Accounts (AC) reached 89.77 million as of June 2019.
The CBN also established the Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility (SANEF) as an intervention to widen and deepen financial access points and services for the purpose of increasing financial inclusion to 80 per cent by the year 2020.
Most importantly, it was reported that the CBN was planning to introduce a new mechanism called the Global Standing Instruction which will work with the BVN of depositors to detect bad borrowers who refuse to pay their loans but plan to take another loan from other unsuspecting DMBs.
