 Financial inclusion has been a great challenge across the world, especially in Africa, with great opportunities for financial services on the micro level. The value of point of sales transactions made in Niger jumped to 3.01 trillion nair in the first half of 2021, with a total volume of 462.11 million transactions in the same period. Now these represent a 50% increase compared to the 2 trillion nair recorded in the corresponding period of 2020 and a 10.3% increase against 2.72 trillion nair recorded in the second half of 2020. However, stakeholders run the Association of Mobile Morning and Bank Agents of Niger, AMBAN, to stem the rising trend of alleged POS customer data mining which has led to people's money being stolen from their bank accounts. We will focus on these issues surrounding mobile morning operations in Nigeria, the opportunities and the future of it. Welcome to Business Insights on Plus TV Africa. I am Justin Acadone. Now cooking gas price, scarcity of diesel as well as Nigeria's public debt took center stage in business Nigeria this week. Take a look. The liquefied petroleum gas retailers branch of the Nigerian Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers on Wednesday raised the alarm over the recent rise in price of liquefied petroleum gas, popularly called cooking gas. It said the cost of the commodity had been on their increase in the last two weeks and urged the government to intervene considering the current energy crisis in Nigeria as seen in the drop in power supply and petrol scarcity. The manufacturer's association of Nigeria MAN has warned that the high cost of diesel used by manufacturers in Nigeria is expected to lead to high cost of goods and services due to the high cost of production. According to the group, the development could further deplete the purchasing power on Nigerians, tasking the federal government to reduce the pressure on the manufacturers and entire population. The federal government has warned that depot owners selling fuel above the approved X-tepo price in filling stations nationwide will be sanctioned. This was announced in a statement by the Ministry of State for Petroleum, Tamipri Silva. He stated that Nigerians are suffering because of the high diesel prices, adding that as a deregulated product when crude prices are high, diesel prices are expected to rise as well. The debt management office DMO has revealed that Nigeria's total public debt has risen to 39.55 trillion Naira as of December 2021. This represents a 1.55 trillion Naira, or 4.1% increase in three months when compared to the 38 trillion Naira total public debt that was recorded as of September 2021. Welcome back. Those were the stories that ran it up on business in Nigeria. Now, the increase in the valley of pure waste transactions in Nigeria shows the spending patterns of Nigerians and payment preferences as compared to cash payments. However, we will talk about some of the issues that came up when Ambed pay the visit to the House Committee on Banking and currency as well as complaint of theft, counterfeited currency and training for regions. I am now being joined by the National Publicist Secretary of Amban, Oluwa Shegum, Ilegbe Dei. Many thanks for joining us on Business Insight in Tlosti, Africa, Oluwa Shegum. Thank you. I am happy to be here. Yes, it is a pleasure. Let's just dive straight into it now. We are having talks as we got some fake alert and the House asked the central bank to introduce a stringent regulations for POS business. As an association, Ambed, so what's your position on this recently? I know you had a briefing concern in that. Yes. One of the reasons why we had that press conference was actually to put things into the right perspective. Some of those items that were mentioned in the motion actually not as it is. I would say in the motion it was alleged that purest operators, purest agents do fake alerts. For one, I can tell you that actually purest agents are fictims of these fake alerts. Explain please. Because it is the bad element in the public that come around pretending that they need cash. And they will tell you they don't have their ATM cards with them. They have perfected this cloning of fake alerts. And then most of the time they visit outlets where the owners of these outlets are not there, where we use some staff. Most of them are school sats, audits. So when they visit, the staff will have to call the boss to know if the boss has gotten value for the transfer, the customer claims to have made. And then they do it in such a way that the owner will say to the staff that you can release cash. But why would the owner say they can release cash when they actually haven't gotten alerts? Because what they have done is to clone a lot of the banks. And they are also expecting even the agents, sometimes they may meet the person himself at his outlet. What happens is that in the rush to serve this customer, the exchange cash, and after the most have left, they discover that this customer has just come to juke me. They have gone away. So we are actually victims of this crime as being said at the floor of the House of Assembly by Honorable Lagi de Jimo. We acknowledge the fact that, yes, some of these things are true, but our members are actually victims. Number two that he said is that there are counterfeit notes. We have received a lot of incident cases from our members across the country where people, they come with a large sum of money, they want to do quick transfers to get some goods and all of that. And they will have fake notes, just a few original ones on the top and they just guard it somehow and they use this, they put pressure on the owner of the outlet to release cash. And these are things that as AMBA we try to train our members for, how to attend to customer, how not to be under pressure so that you can be in charge, in control. When the customer walks into your outlet, you are not under his control. You need to be very calm in attending to them so that you can actually get to see if you are collecting the counterfeit notes. Let's talk about the counterfeited bills for one moment. And you talked about how your association, that is AMBA trained members on how they need to become so they don't fall victim. Over time, do you also train your members on how to identify these counterfeited bills when they are being presented to them? Of course. That is one of the, we made in our meetings, we tried to let them know the true features of the Naira notes, the different denominations for them to be able to identify. And then we also have been able to get in some supplies of machines, the small ones at very reduced rates, that they can have at the outlets and to also use to validate if the note they are collecting are counterfeited or not. So this is part of what the association is doing. Okay. Let's do talk about the sanity in this particular industry or association as it were. Because if you look at it now, practically every street, every nook and cranny, you go around Nigeria, you see, POS operators or agents rather, you know, mountain, you know, just services operating, sometimes are very, you know, secluded places, sometimes are just umbrellas and chairs, some do with the regular kiosk. But what is the standard, really? And how do you ensure that, you know, there is sanity in the system? Because I also hear that you are starting some sort of a task force. Let me say this. We are in agreement with the House to have some sort of sanity in our industry, in our business space. We are in agreement with them. If there is any stakeholder in this business space that has been clamoring for disenforcement of guidelines, it is unbound. And so we are in agreement of that. And let me say this, in the motion, it was also posted that there are no guidelines. Our business is not an circumstance. It was a deliberate effort of the government to cushion the effect of poverty and to also deepen financial inclusion to the last mile. That was why this sector of the business was corrected. So having said that, there's a guideline. And so we also have the opinion that the guideline must be strictly enforced. We have, we understand when this started like 10, 11 years ago, before you can become a mobile money or bank agent, you must have a brick or mortar or kiosk. I mean, an address that is traceable, that if anybody has an issue, they can easily. In fact, at that time, you also need a letter from the community head or your market leader to also identify you, that we know him, because you will be dealing with the public fund. So what we have today, that we have agents under the umbrella, under the trees, are pure violations of the guidelines. And these are the things that we found at our level, that if these are not needed in the board, we are sitting on the keg of gunpowder. And so the association wants this enforcement of the guidelines that we have, the framework of the CBA. However, what we don't want is that there shouldn't be any disconnect between the government and we that are really at the last rung of the ladder. We want them to sit with us, let them hear from us so that we can give them the realities that is obtainable out there. They can't just make laws for us, when they do not even understand how the business operates. So that is where we are. Okay. All right. I'll take a quick break. But when I come back, I will also need you to just give us some clear way to go as regards to some great areas that people have talked about. For instance, they are talking about the POS merchants, all the surrounding banks and they allegedly make them the ATMs are not to work. It's still business in site and close to Africa. We still have Oluwa, Shagu, Elikbide with us in the studios. We'll take a quick break and return with more. Do join us again. All right. Welcome back to business in site and close to Africa. We are looking at financial inclusion vis-a-vis the operations of a mobile money and of course bank agents in Nigeria to ensure sanity because there have been lots of complaints concerning the operations and we have Oluwa, Shagu, Elikbide with us in the studios. So let's talk more concerning data. Is there any truth to the fact that these POS operators, they allegedly, it sounds funny though, they allegedly make some sort of collaboration, maybe with bank officials or I don't know. Sometimes you notice that they're always around banks and then somehow the ATMs don't work and lo and behold, you have the purest agents to your rescue. Just like you have said, they are allegations and they are laughable. One of the roles that we have come to play and I will say categorically that if all mobile money and bank agents down to today, the banks cannot handle the traffic that they generate. They cannot. Because practically most people don't even go for bank for withdrawals or transfers these days. These days you see people with their shots just walk out of their room to the nearest outlet to make withdrawals. So the fact is, there are different networks that have the different switches. The banks, ATMs, the POS, even with POS A and POS B, there are different switches. You can, you discover that the next outlets will tell you, does he have network on his POS terminal? Then you discover that when you go to the next one, you are able to do your transaction. Does he mean the POS A as sabotage, the network of POS B? No. Just like you have for telcos, where you can say there's no network on your own line and the other person will say I have network here. That's how this operate. It's pure technology. But when you see that people swam around ATM points, the one that is even wrong because you're not supposed to hook. They're supposed to have the visible locations. It's a visible location. You're not supposed to hook. It is not bread and puff puff. This financial service, you have to be in a standard location where people come to you because you must record your transactions. So when you see people work around, because they know that there's a limit to what they can load in the machines. And then on weekends most times, the banks have gone off. They only come back to check and reload. So at that point, between the time the machine is not dispensing again and the point they are reloaded, that availability gap is what the POS again that hook around makes use of. All those that even have outlets around the bank. There's nobody sabotaging. The fact is we have a large population that the banks, as we have them today, cannot cater for. All right. Let's try and understand something else now. You talked about mobile money operators. You talked about bank agents. I'll need you to just give a bit of a differentiation between both of them. And then again, is this an old commerce affairs as it is right now? Because sometimes you find people ordinarily, it's as though practically everywhere you go, you just see people with a POS. Even those who do all that business, they just put the POS on the side and they also see their agent as well. So I need you to explain the difference between a mobile money operator and of course the bank agent or POS agents as it's where and then how accessible is it to just get a POS. Okay. There are two set of institutions that are playing in the field. We have the bank led and the non-bank led. The bank led, I mean, you have some banks who have the co-agency banking structure. They have it. I don't want to begin to mention names. Then you also have the non-bank led, the MMOs, who also have the license to operate as a player in the industry. So you can get provided by any of these set of institutions. That is one. Number two, it is not an all commerce affair. It is just because of the enforcement of the framework and guidance that we're talking about that is not really in place. And that's why we as an association, we're talking about self-regulation because we see that things are going down the drain and we know what efforts, some of the pioneers of this business have put in and we do not want that to go to waste. So it is not an all commerce affair. Number one, you need to have a visible location. You need to be known. Of course, it's like you're opening a bank account. All the requirements of opening a bank account are required for you to supply it to have a provider with any of the institutions that you have chosen. But then, of course, there has to be spacing. What we have today is that you see agents cluster around a small area in a place where you just have 50 residents. I mean, one person is serving that 50 people. Then you see that in the next two months, the customers are not increasing. So how does Amban ensure that that does not happen? That is what the task force that we have integrated now. They are going to it's going to a show across the nation. The tax force is going to begin to go out. We highlighted this last year in your states and you saw the result. We went out and we saw that many of these agents are just operating. They don't have any record of any kind. You know, you know, and these are things that are just primary requirements. As an agent, you must have your record book where you record your transactions. If anything happens in 2018, then you go back to your record, open it. And I mean, it has saved a lot of people. But what you will find out today is that even the transaction of yesterday, some agents will tell you they don't have any record for it. So in fact, they should be keeping records of every transaction. Every transaction, any type of transaction. Because in the transaction, we draw, we deposit, we pay. So all of these have to be in a proper book with the dates. And that is how you are able to also track your own fund to know if you are making profit or not. So you don't just get into the business just to throw away money. That is what majority of the people are doing out there. All right. I know this in so many ways, you know, has helped a lot of unemployed youths, you know, because practically, most people wouldn't just want to fold their arms. So school leavers have taken, you know, into this particular business. But then again, I need to understand one more thing. You would just say the banks are in a way liable with this issue of proliferation of, you know, POS agents and all over the place. Because I've had a school of thought say that most times they just want to meet this target and also they just go about giving POS randomly. Is this true? Yeah, I would say yes. I don't bounce alone now. We are the MMOs too. OK, the Mamba Monopredos, yeah. If there are people that really have this nonchalance attitude to our approach to enforce the guidelines, I mean, there are some players who will tell their agents being their principal, they will tell them, don't join Amban. And we are telling them we are not in competition with you. It is for us to have sanity, to have sanity in the business space so that everybody will be fine. Now, if all of us come together as everybody in the value chain come together, we understand the problems that we have and we see to how we can resolve all of this and have a better business space, better for us. We cannot say and in all of this, they invest more. And there were times gone by where, I mean, some of them were observing these guidelines. But when they saw that some people were not doing say, they joined the free. I mean, it's now like Banana Republic. That is what we are saying. That's what that is why we are saying we do not want this kind of situation. All right. We just believe and hope that in a matter of time, a very small time that, you know, these issues that would be adequately addressed and, you know, all of them, this insanity that we find in this particular sector will be completely be done with over time. Almost a very big thank you to you as well for finding time to join us to look at all of these issues. Thank you for having me. All right. Indeed, we have been speaking with Oluwa Shergou. He is the National Public Relations Officer of Amban, which is the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents of Nigeria. Now, that's the size of the show for today. I am Justin Kadunge. Let's do it again next time. Bye for now.