Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN and Deposit Money Banks have commenced the process of a biometric solution to identify every bank customer in the country. The system is being put in place by a German company, Dermalog Identification System in partnership with Chams.
When operational, the identity of every customer would be in a central database which could be accessed by all banks by a click of the button. This could happen in the next three months. It will also make services much easier for customers as they could undertake transactions without cheque books or even when they forget their account numbers. All that would be required is to place their fingers on the scanner and their personal data would immediately pomp up on the screen.
Speaking at the agreement signing event in Abuja, yesterday, CBN Governor Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi said, “it is a very important day for us in the banking industry. For many years we have been talking about financial inclusion, about expanding banking services for the general population, about access to credit and also dealing with KYC, money laundering etc and recognizing that at the heart of any solution to the problem
“I suppose for a long time we have been waiting for the National Identity card and progress is being made and I would like to, use this opportunity to let everybody understand that the banking industry project is not in any way incompatible with the National Identity Card process. Whatever happens to NIC, we will try to roll in what ŵe have here, but we took a decision almost two years ago that it is not wise to continue waiting for the bigger project to happen and we have to, as it were, take our own destinies into our own hands and start our own KYC and an identification data base.<br
“We set up a committee chaired by the GMD of Zenith bank with membership from Aceess, First Bank, Uba and Skye, merge CEOs were part of that committee and the whole idea was to start a whole process that would lead to the banking industry collaborating and paying for one single biometric data base that would serve the purpose of helping us with authentication, dealing with KYC, money laundering issues, fraud issues, credit extension issues, financial inclusion issues.
“Now from this it is a very short step to biometric ATMs and POS, biometric payment solutions, biometric fraud detection tests, access to credit bureau and the potentials are enormous.
This is something that is owned by all the banks so every bank CEO played a role in this and I thank them for their support.
“The vision is that this would go beyond the banks, hopefully in the next three months we would have finished with by getting the backbones in NIBSS and Central Bank and all bank head offices and some branches in places three months from now I should be able to officially say this has taken off the ground.
