When things are working well in Nigeria, we never like to step away and let the fun continues. Paga just reported a massive progress in 2016 with excess of N156 billion in transaction value. That shows that what we have now is working well as the sector is growing looking at investments in Paystack, Flutterwave, and other firms.
But in Nigeria, we do not like such positives.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has hinted at effecting a new e-payment pricing policy, which will start May this year.
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According to the apex bank, the move is in and in tandem with the objectives of the Payments System Vision 2020. “We are the verge of coming up with a new Merchant Service Charge (MSC) which is the fee paid by merchants for e-transactions done through Point of Sales (PoS) terminals,” said Dipo Fatokun, CBN Director of Banking and Payment System.
He stated that the deregulation will give way to a new pricing regime on electronic transactions or interchange fee by Q2 of 2017 and will ultimately boost payment card issuance, investment in loyalty programmes and the expansion of acquirer network infrastructure across the country. That is always the thinking. Why must government be involved in setting up the price? Why not allow market forces to determine?