 Welcome back now to our discussion segment. With its universal usability, many Nigerians have adopted unstructured supplementary service data, USSD services. Bank customers have saved themselves from long bank queues by typing short codes on their phones to carry out some of their financial transactions. USSD code has opened the door for many Nigerians to utilize financial services, improving the adoption of e-payment systems and financial inclusion generally. But the progress made so far is currently threxing by an age-long dispute between the telecoms firms and the banks. I am now being joined by the former president of the Private Telecoms and Communications Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, Texan, Comrade Oladakbo, Moses. Thank you for joining me, Osmosis. Thank you and good morning Nigerians and the viewers all over the world. Thank you for having me. Good morning to you, Comrade. Now, since 2019, banks and telcos have been at loggerheads over who should pay for USSD services and how the payment should be made. This has led to many threats of a discontinuation and a whole lot of that. But generally, how should it really be done? Well, thank you very much our viewers and Justin. Thank you and again, thank you for having me. USSD code 9 out of 10 mobile transactions in Sub-Saharan Africa flow through the USSD code. And though presently it is an old technology spanning over 20 years globally for the technology to advance countries, but in Africa it is just gaining momentum here. So that makes it a bit difficult to actually compare the international best practices with Nigeria or Africa. But however, we still must discuss this. Now, two things that we work with are comparison is number one. The number of bankable, the bankable size, the percentage of bankable size in advanced countries, they have a larger size than our own. Then number two, the technology involved. They are more advanced technologically. Look at the volume that has been done in the last quarter of this year. You will see that there are a lot of failed or unsolved transactions till now that people are still worried about. But because of the advancement and those two factors I've talked about, the best practices that are done now in those advanced countries is that subscribers actually subscribed. Users subscribed to those USSD services. For example, you can have a 24 hour subscription. You can have a weekly subscription or an annual subscription. So immediately a user agreed to be on the USSD service. You make your choice of weekly, daily or yearly, then you pay it. Then after that is done, your transaction throughout the year you will not pay again. It is annual. It is monthly the same thing. It is 24 hours the same thing. So that is what has been done in advanced countries now because it has gone so commercial. And presently in Nigeria, I believe we will get there as time goes on. But I just hope that eating charges will not be the problem with our own. Thank you. All right. Osmos is telecom operators. They have disclosed that 90% of traffic on USSD was driven by financial transactions carried out by bank customers in the country. Specifically, I get charged a 6998 cover fee for most of the transactions that I do by my bank. But why is this same amount not being remitted? I don't understand. Well, this has been a recurring issue for some years now, if not almost up to almost a decade or so. It is an issue of the port calling K2 Black. Bank want to make money at the mercy of the telcos, making nothing. Now, in one of the previous meetings by the CBN, the NCC, and the rest, NCC was also of the view that the services should be suspended. The payments, the charges should be suspended. That was the NCC's view. And they were backed by CBN who said that USID is a sunk cost, meaning that there is no additional cost on the infrastructure of the telecoms to provide USID services. You know, when they start saying that there is infrastructure, there is nothing like physical infrastructure at this point. It has to be some software or handshake infrastructure, not physically infrastructure. So, the CBN saying that it's a sunk cost gave the banks the morale or the courage to believe that they are not supposed to pay this money. And the way our nation will run presently is so funny because CBN had an agreement with the bank, with the telcos that should pay. The banks refused to pay. CBN has done it. Except CBN will come on after some times and then bring them to the table until we are advised to pay. And this is becoming so funny because now the banks have made the money from the customers. Why not pay the money? So, it's just a funny scenario in this country. But the issue is so germane that if the telcos doesn't provide those infrastructures, those services, their telecoms, the bank cannot have that service. So, why not have an agreement and pay? The customers have already paid. So, it's just a funny ritual between the CBN and the banks. Alright, comrade. So, I hear that there is a meeting. This is not the first of several meetings that have been held concerning this issue. But Alton, Artcon, CBN, and of course other stakeholders are meeting today. What's the worst that can really happen? Because already there have been some glitches in the system. Have telcos stopped expanding the U.S.S.D infrastructure so far? Well, if telcos will stop expanding their infrastructure, it's going to be a loose, loose to them. Because like I said earlier, by the time this thing becomes more commercial, the telcos may have to go on their own separately, but they will still need the infrastructure of the banks, the bank accounts, the bank cards, the bank authentication services, and the rest. So, they can't stop expanding infrastructure. So, and then the worst that can happen, it happens sometimes, but I think I've already heard it now. MTA was suspended by some banks when they started, when they increased, reduced the commission on the MTA services for using the U.S.S.D. So, the worst that can happen is the government coming with a split. That's okay. Now, let us talk to the bank from collecting the charges. Let the charges go directly from the subscriber to the telcos. So, that's the worst. Both of them need this business because it's a very cool money. You know, a business, you don't need a staff to do any extra thing. Then you don't be coding. You've done the, you've configured the routers, the machine. Then automatically, you can work like that for as long as possible. So, it's a loose lose if the telcos talk, and it's a loose for the bank if the telcos doesn't support them. So, I think Nigerians should be less worried. It's a fight between the two elephants that cannot destroy the grass. All right. Okay, let me just reel out some statistics right now. Mobile transactions increased by 505.29% in the first quarter of this year alone. As individuals used it 607.93 million times. What do we have in our hands? Because if you ask me, it's as though Nigerians have actually decided to just go full blown to USSD. What do we have in our hands if these things just left to just kill off just like that? Well, the first quarter of this year is as a result of the emergency on planned cashless policy. It affected almost everybody. In fact, I myself was almost duped via my USSD. I had to deactivate it. It was a necessity of compromise. People have no choice. That's where the surge came up. Because it's funny that people are still not convenient. Many people are not comfortable with all the USSD and online transactions because unlike when you have cash, you can spend 5,000 a year without getting charged. But with the USSD and the online banking, you can't even spend 2,000 a year without the charges. So, at the end of the day, I believe that though it's a good service because it is a good design, but our banks need to come up with more fear, fear to the users. It's not everything you have to put in charges and then. But I believe if you look at the next quarter, that's from after the election march to June, you will see a drastic drop because people are now preferring to go back to their banks because of all the solutions and a lot of things. So, it's a cool design where both of them, the bank and the telcos, don't need to have a good agreement because it's a good design for the businesses, for them to make a very powerful profit. So, that is it. All right, Comrade, with all of this play now with the dispute between the telcos and the bank and all the stakeholders, what's the impact of all of this on the federal government's financial inclusion drive? Okay, let me make a reference to some countries. Countries like India, Kenya, Bangladesh, South Africa, recently have been cutting costs, cutting down on the fees, charging speed on their electricity. For example, India, presently I think they're on $0.007. Kenya is on $0.01, Bangladesh is $0.01, and South Africa is $0.04. And Nigeria presently, what we paid presently is like $0.017, higher than other countries that I've mentioned according to the Bill and Melinga report. Now, what this does is that if the government really want to include the people, the government need to take a true decision on two things, either financial gain or inclusiveness of the people. If you are looking at inclusiveness, we need to drop down this price. Since Naira 98 Corvo is huge. For example, a lot of people don't want to embrace it at all now. So why not bring it down to as low as one Naira? Now, it's just a form of mathematics. You have one million people doing the service for since Naira 98 Corvo. Now, if you take to one Naira, what about having 180 million people coming up on the service? It makes more money. A lot of people that don't want to be included in the banking cover will come on. Just like India now, 80% of Indian adults have bank accounts. Just because of some things, you know, they reduce in the US ID, there's some FinTech and some additional technology upgrade in India. So I believe the government need to take a drastic decision. In order you want to include the masses, you want them to come up on banking, or you want to make a case for banking sectors and the telcos. So it's a very decision for the government to make now, but the government need to be sincere. Okay. Finally, as we let you go now, Osmosis, this is another development now. Five years after the NCC shared a report on uniform short codes, stakeholders in the telecoms industry will now begin implementation. What's the main argument for this harmonization? Yeah. The HSC, that's a harmonized short code, is a welcome development. For example, I think Ghana implemented theirs long, long back before this. And because one needs to assist us in the ease of memorizing, you know, most times when you need to do some services, is that you have to go to get the details or you ask your friends. So using an harmonized short code is better so that you just have one. So it's ease of access. But the main argument about it still come back to our infrastructure on telecoms. Because now we are going to be having a single point of entry. Everybody goes through the same way. So and you know, when you go through a single point of entry, there's possibility of a single point of failure. Now, this has been happening already. If you look at our pure services, at times before now, when the pure is down, either via the NIDS, a bank settlement system, before you can have one service provider go down, another one is working. But in the last two, three years now, you see that when a service go down, every other services are down. So that is the same fear. The same things we have with this HSC code, harmonized short code. That means if one service, for example, if 300 is for customer service and it is down, then nobody can reach any customer service. You can reach GLO, you can reach MT, you can reach SELAT, you can reach ETH. Alright, thank you so much, Moses. We have been speaking with him. He is the former National President of the Private Telecoms and Communication Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, Texan. Thanks for your influence on the show this morning. Thank you so much. Thank you and have a nice day. Thank you. As we round off now, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has threatened to penalize sheep in companies exporting undocumented cargos from the country. Now, CBN governor, Gadri, they may have already spoke at the RT200 Non Oil Export Summit 2023 on Tuesday in Abuja. Now, the summit is themed RT200 Challenges and Prospect. It may have already said the development of the non-oil export sector is crucial given that it holds vast potential for generating a significant amount of foreign exchange earnings. We mean some such lights on undocumented exports and we had advised the shipping lines at that meeting that we would also be monitoring and if we find that they export cargos with that documentation that we will penalize them including placing their accounts on P&D post-no-debit and I'm sure we all know what post-no-debit means. We have so far not done anything like that just because we feel that our shipping lines will be responsible to do what is right. But if we do not see the kind of corporations that we'll expect, I'd have to insist that we will do what we need to do. For any export to a warehouse established outside India, for instance, with the permission of the Reserve Bank of India their export proceeds can be repatriated within 15 months from the date of shipment. Many countries of the world have these requirements to ensure effective export repatriation back to their countries. Ladies and gentlemen, we will agree that the challenges facing our country today are many and evolving. These challenges require macroeconomic policy actions that are inclined towards a market-based financing system. Some of these innovative ideas could spring from deep system thinking and... All right, that was the president of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the governor of the CBN. Godwin, if you're talking about Chippin and of course how undocumented companies would actually be penalized if they don't do the due process. But that's the size of the show for today. I am Justin, Acadonia Business Insight Returns. Again, tomorrow, let's do it again. Bye for now.