Banking must WORK in Nigeria and these failures must stop

I am a teacher and teachers receive most of their rewards in the high heavens, only jara are paid here in the gravity-heavy earth. But I want to ask Nigerian banks to open a donor account, I am open to support with N1,000, to help fix whatever they need to fix to get banking services back.

What happened in the last 4 days is unprecedented in our business – payments are failing, salaries of workers are failing, and as I write, reconciliations are convoluted. The fintechs are showing “successful” but banks are not crediting or debiting as expected.

Fellow citizens, moments like this remind everyone that banking is the operating system of any economy. What we have experienced in the last few days has not happened for a long time. And this failure must end. This requires a senate-level investigation to check if someone is after the destruction of Nigeria.

To cap this, it came on the weekend before the start of our program. Just at the wrong time. Good People, keep trying, we understand the challenges. But we need to tell banks to step up and stop paying dividends, and invest in their technologies if that is the problem.

Pure and simple, banking must WORK in Nigeria and these failures must stop. These failures can destroy our economy if they continue.

Comment on Feed

Comment: Too much for the “cashless economy” mantra.

My Response: For cashless to work, the system must be seamless. The issue here is that reversals are happening. Payments are failing. Everything is broken.

Comment 2: I wrote against the timing and the very poor planning and execution of the cashless policy but many were merely focusing on the over-hyped vote buying prevention benefits.

The selfish Nigerian elites merely designed the policy from its myopic perspective without any consideration for the masses that operate outside our formal sectors.

It bears repetition that the majority of Nigerians are illiterates, live in the rural areas, have no bank account, have no access to electricity and have no access to the internet. You are free to believe anything to the contrary to your loss.

Unfortunately, the minority but loud, literate Nigerians residing in the major urban areas dominate the corridors of power, dominate every discourse and call the shorts from their vantaged positions.

The second truth is that our so-called cashless options function in fits and somehow unreliable, even at the best of times.

Now CBN has gleefully mopped the old notes from the economy, proved incapable of or unwilling to replacing the mopped notes with new ones and the entire cashless architecture is unravelling with our eyes wide open.

The yearning question is, what’s the game plan of the powers that be in the land and the orchestrator of the prevailing madness?

Comment 3: Ndubuisi Ekekwe the systems of commercial banks are failing because the number of transactions have increased drastically due to cash shortage and their poorly designed systems are not scalable. The systems of fintech companies are better designed than most banks applications. The major reason for this is because banks are very terrible when it comes to treating their engineers well in terms of pay, welfare and some very dirty office politics.

Even before the spike in transactions, a lot of them are already struggling due to the high exit rate of
their experienced engineers. Most of them left for other companies that have a better pay and a good work environment.

Banks like GTB, Zenith and now Access are now performing poorly interms of digital banking while Fintech companies like TeamApt, Opay, Palmpay, Flutterwave, Paystack and Interswitch are growing stronger and building a more reliable and scalable systems.

Have you noticed how almost all the POS machines that are owned by commercial banks are going into extinction due to poor service?

Well, if I may ask you, why do you want to donate money to people that are making billions of Naira annually as profit ? Pleaee donate the money to the poor.

Comment 4: There is capacity deficit across board, but when you are never tested to the limits, you keep deluding yourself that you have a robust infrastructure that won’t crack under massive stress. Wait till February 25, if just 50 million Nigerians step forward to vote, INEC system will collapse. INEC hasn’t conducted an election where 50 million people participated before, so what happens if we witness such numbers this month? Expect a total chaos.

We don’t test our capabilities enough in this country, and that is why we keep believing that we are doing great, until a small challenge shows up.

We will be all right, only that we don’t learn enough.

Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.