Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria Godwin Emefiele has said that FinTech is crucial to Nigeria’s economic recovery from COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, FinTech will play a more vital role towards resilient and sustainable recovery. Speaking with journalists in Enugu State, Emefiele said that year 2007 marked a turning point in the country’s payments system terrain with the launch of the CBN’s Payment Systems Vision 2020 (PSV 2020), which identified series of recommendations to increase the resilience of the payment system infrastructure and work-streams to encourage the usage of electronic payment methods.
“Technology continues to change the face of the financial services industry. The advent of digital financial services, for example, has created faster, more efficient, and typically cheaper transactions compared to traditional financial services. As the global economy recovers from COVID-19, it is obvious that FinTech will play a more important role towards resilient and sustainable recovery,” he said.
Emefiele further said “Indeed, the spread of COVID-19 at the time accelerated the speed of digitalisation of many sectors of the economy. Expectedly, discussions have increased around the issue of the digital economy just as more opportunities have come up for financial institutions and other players within the payment ecosystem to innovate and provide more efficient options for payments and settlements.” The central bank governor also noted that FinTech companies have attracted no less than $1 billion in investments in the last six years.
