Recently, Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele flagged off the second phase of the eNaira project noting that it is intended to drive financial inclusion by onboarding unbanked and underserved users leveraging offline channels.
Also, hee disclosed that Nigerians will be able to open an eNaira wallet and conduct transactions by simply dialing *997# from their mobile phones soon.
The governor announced this while delivering a keynote address at the Grand Finale of the eNaira Hackathon, held at the International Conference Centre Abuja, on Thursday, August 18, 2022, restating the Bank’s commitment to achieving its mandate of preserving monetary and financial stability.
He said that when the eNaira was launched in October 2021, “the Bank promised to increase the level of financial inclusion in the country because just like the Naira, the eNaira is expected to be accessible to all Nigerians and would provide more possibilities to bring in the unbanked into the digital economy.
The launch of the initiative, the eNaira had reached 840,000 downloads, with about 270,000 active wallets comprising over 252,000 consumer wallets and 17,000 merchant wallets. In addition, the volume and value of transactions on the platform had been remarkable, reaching above 200,000 and N4.4billion.
The governor believes the achievements, aligned with the fact that Nigerians, both within and outside the country, possess innovative ideas and are willing and ready to leverage exciting opportunities that the eNaira presents for enhancing digital financial services and contributing to national development.
Besides individuals using the USSD code, the Governor said merchants and consumers with bank accounts will be able to use the NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) to transfer and receive eNaira to any bank account, stressing that this will further deepen the integration of the eNaira with the existing national payment infrastructure.
According to him, “The second phase of the project has begun and is intended to drive financial inclusion by onboarding the unbanked and the underserved users leveraging offline channels.
Hence greater success is envisioned for the project with phase two expected to deliver more gains with the target of eight million users based on estimation using the diffusion of innovation model.”
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