The Central Bank of Nigeria has, therefore, directed that all payment service providers should, henceforth, ensure routing of all transactions from point-of-sale terminals at merchant and agent sites, whether physical or electronic, through an authorized Payment Terminal Service Aggregator.
The Central Bank announced this in a Thursday circular signed by Oladimeji Yisa Taiwo, representing CBN’s director of Payments System Management Department.
This is as the CBN granted a 30-day ultimatum to service providers to comply with revised routing requirements for Point of Sales transactions.
This step is intended to improve the supervision of electronic transactions in Nigeria, according to the bank, and decentralize the routing of PoS transactions to avoid concerns that such transactions are being centralized under one institution.
It therefore read thus: “.The CBN hereby directs that all transactions from PoS terminals at merchant and agent locations whether on physical or electronic PoS terminals, shall be routed through any CBN-licensed Payment Terminal Service Aggregator.”
While the PTSAs are obliged to send PoS transactions to only those processors certified by the relevant Payment Scheme, nominated by the Acquirer, and licensed by the CBN.
This development comes as the deadline set by the Corporate Affairs Commission, to streamline enterprises owned by PoS operators, expired last week in September 2024.
According to the latest statistics from Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc, PoS terminals accounted for 26.37 percent of fraud incidences in 2023. Remember that in 2011, the CBN awarded NIBSS a PTSA license to track electronic transactions in Nigeria.
