 Umband is asking the central bank of Nigeria Sea Grant to include agency category in addition to individual or corporate categories of cash withdrawal limit policy. It says if individuals have a cash withdrawal limit of 100,000 per day and 500,000 per week, it therefore follows that the agent will serve 20 individuals and they should have 10 million per week to enable the agent adequately serve more individuals, among other issues that were raised there. Now my guest Fasasi Sharafa Dinatonda is a strategic thinker and mass market specialist. He is a CBN certified financial inclusion educator, a bank and mobile agent trainer, a certified digital financial services analyst, a panelist at several financial inclusion fora, including Bill and Melinda Gates' facilitated LBS financial inclusion program. He is an alumnus of the prestigious Lagos Business School, he is also the MDCEO of the Ecosystem Limited and presently the national president of the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria Umband. Many thanks for joining us Mr. Atoda. Thank you so much for having me. Good morning Nigeria, good morning and happy New Year to you all. Alright, let's just start with the cash obscurity issue before we look at all the issues plaguing the financial inclusion system in Nigeria. What exactly is going on right now? CBN is a legend that banks and POS are actually having some sort of connivance and they are responsible for the scarcity of cash in circulation, but however, you mentioned at the briefing last year that there is more to this than meets the eye. Can you just tell us more? Thank you so much. I must first of all admit the fact that Central Bank of Nigeria is actually going in a good direction and we commend their efforts of moving Nigeria to a sort of a digital economy and a cashless economy. So to us, we are in total support at the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria to build a country where we can limit the use of cash and drive digital transactions. So that feasibility can be assured and also digital security and it can also grow the economy because there will be feasibility to allow transactions that were done by cash before now. But as associations, with over 1.7 million members across the country, we are on the edge. We have the understanding on how to implement those policies better. So and I think our experiences are important at this level for CBN so that we will not run the masses of the people into another traumatic experience. Let me start with the issue of the cash. As of today, there is no challenge with the volume of the cash in circulation. The challenge is the distribution of the cash. That is where the problem is. According to CBN, last report, there is about 2.5 trillion Naira cash in circulation. And there is a policy that CBN is implementing on cashless policy. They are trying to narrow it to the minimum level, the number of cash in circulation. Why they are doing that, they are encouraging people to migrate to other alternative channels of transaction. And that is fantastic. So from the implementation point of view, based on experiences, over 50% of Nigerians are residing in the rural areas and their transactions volume are enormous and they are done by cash. Why are they done by cash? Because of infrastructure challenge, which is network, most of our terrains are not covered, as we all know that the internet penetration in Nigeria is less than 50%. So we cannot do magic in that area. So we need to now reinvent and innovate. How do we achieve cashless without driving people into crisis? So we can work with the agent networks across the country. That is our position. A typical rural agent today is the bank branch of the whole thousands of population in the community. And we have styled such an agent from accessing cash because CBN in their own policy of distributing cash or rolling out cash, there is no agent category. We only have individual categories that is limited to 100,000 error per day and corporate category that is limited to 500,000 error per day, we draw limits. We are not saying that I follow the return to cash era, but we are saying that let the CBN come out, involve the stakeholders, that this is where we are going. We want to join in from point A to point B. What is the volume of cash interpolation to the 2.5 trillion? Let us call that 100%. Am I right? Yeah. Then what is the plan of joining from 100% cash to 60% to 50% and to 10% cash? We must be carried along. We must have the understanding. All right. When we are moving organically towards cashless society, what are we doing to also stabilize the alternative part of transactions, which are the QR codes, USB codes, bank transfers and all that. All right. You will have good with me today. All right. Yeah. A lot of merchants, petrol stations, supermarkets, even in the cities, they are rejecting bank transfer. I have a video evidence of a particular restaurant in the heart of Lagos between the islands. Where they rejected bank transfer from me, that anything from cash or cash. So we have to, people that are rejecting bank transfer will not accept QR codes. All right. So because of time, let us see if we understand that AMBAN actually wants an agency category that has been established by you right now and also in the press conference that you addressed sometime last week. But I want you to elucidate more on this issue of mandatory use of BVN and or NIN for tier 1 wallets and account. You are welcoming the development, but then you have some concerns specifically as regards linkages because, ordinarily, most people have NIN. Thank you very much. Before the game, I said, CBN will commend them for that policy, is for the safety of our payment system in Nigeria. And we totally support it. At the same time, based on our own experiences on the feeds, we feel that, and first thing, number one, the law, the regulation is targeting the different people that entirely. The regulations will not be targeted at the customer, the innocent customers, to come and regularizing their KYC because they already have those KYC, NIN or BVN, every account owner in Nigeria, whether it's wallet system owner or a tier 1 account, they have all these NIN or BVN sitting with an agency of the government because they have been forced, they have been mandated to link their NIN with their sim card and all of them use the phone number to open an account. So why are we dragging them to come and regularize? Why not ban, direct that instruction to the banks and providers to reach out to the NIN? These are the least of the possible that are not having their NIN attached to their accounts. Everything is digitalized in Nigeria today. They can do what we call API call and start calling the NIMC database and link it without troubling the masses of the people. That is our own idea. Number two is that we want every new account to also carry BVN name. That means we want a more enrollment, we want to push more enrollment on name and BVN. Because of that capacity today, there is no way you can capture new NIN today apart from the government NIMC offices. What is their capacity? Because before now, agent locations across the country have been involved in NIN and Roman and they have been able to move the number of NIN from 45 million recorded in last year to above 100 million within the space of two years. These same agents were being hold by NIMC for two years. They have not paid them and last year they suspended all activities in their location. So there is no access for Nigeria to enroll today. That means they are not ready. So it will be difficult for people to access it. Also, the policy is also looking at tier two, tier three, high volume accounts. Should now be linked to both BVN and NIN. And technologically, before we can link the two, they must have the same data. But today there are a lot of variances, discrepancies between the phone number, the date of birth and all these things on NIN and BVN. What you need to do, the service you need to bring them to par is what we call modification. And that service is not available anywhere outside the reach of the people. It is only with the government agency, which is NINC. So these are the challenging people we face. If this policy starts without CBN advising NINC to reactivate all agent locations to enroll and pay them their outstanding. Because they are also holding NINSA microfinance bank and all banks in Nigeria. So they need to pay them, then they can start. The same thing with BVN. Alright. As we begin to round off right now, let's talk about the positive challenges. Because right now there is the issue of a 3% charge and that of a trust issue. Because lately there's been talk of post-no-debate and post-no-credit and all of that. Quickly, in a minute, I just want you to just sum your thoughts on that. Thank you very much. The current leadership of Central Bank of Nigeria, just as the office, and they need to know that they need to undo a lot of policies that were inflicted on Nigeria last year, December, during the former government era. Part of it. Because I must confess to you, a lot of that are created trust issue. And discourage businesses from bringing their money to the bank. That is why most of the banks on their books today, they are not getting deposits. People will rather keep their money in their houses than to bring it to where their accounts have been locked. A lot of accounts were PND, post-no-debate, and they were locked during that period. But the fact that they deposited above the threshold, stipulated by policies there. Now that the policies are up, no more 30% charge again, then you need to go and lock the banks. Don't forget those accounts. They need to, you know, really offer those accounts and to engage us so that we can turn all the members of the agency to change agents across the local communities of the country, so that we can tell people that we now have new sheriff in town, leadership of CBA, that they should bring their money back to the bank and to the financial system. So we need a lot of financial details, you know, engagement to ensure that people across our banking system again and again. Alright, on the final notes now, I remember you talked about, this should actually excite Nigerian, you talked about creating 500,000 jobs in the fourth quarter of this year. How do you go about that very quickly in just about the minutes so we round off this conversation? Yeah, fantastic. A country that has developed with Nigeria, like Nigeria, shouldn't have no justification to say that they have done it. Because there are more things to be done. But our policies are throwing people out of jobs. Imagine, you know, over thousands of Nigerians that we engage that have been disabled across Nigeria from enrollment, you know, you have pushed a lot of people out of jobs. So BVN, a country opening, you have pushed a lot of people out of jobs. We are now appealing to the central bank of Nigeria and the president, Bola Amin Kinobu, that as we are moving on the bank again in Nigeria, we are ready to contribute about 500,000 jobs in two words. If we are enabled, what are those enableities? Return the enrollment services back to the location and pay their outstanding. Number two, BVN enrollment, let us also be enabled to undo it for masses of the people across the country. So we are preparing to have 100,000, 100,000 enrollment agents per local government in Nigeria. For NIN, for BVN, for all categories of enrollment. Thank you so much. We are completely out of time. I guess we would have to bring you back on the show because there are salient issues to discuss as we got some of the financial inclusion policy of the federal government. My guest has been Farzassi Sharifah-Din. He is the national president of Amban Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria. Many thanks for being a part of the show for this morning. Thank you. Thank you, Bola. All right, and that's the size of the show for today. These are Business Insight will return again to your screen at the same time. Bye for now. I am Justin Acadone.