Sept. 7, 2023

…Says amicable resolution reached to settle USSD debt issue

The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigeria Communications Commission, NCC, Umar Danbatta has emphasised the importance of the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), in driving the digital financial inclusion strategy policy of the government.

Danbatta also disclosed that the Digital financial inclusion index or penetration in the country has now reached about 70% because it is telco driven.

The EVC stated this while delivering journalists at the annual Telecom Executives and Regulators Forum, TERF, hosted by the Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria, ATCON, in Lagos on Thursday.

According to him, when the NCC did the determination for the cost of USSD services it came up with a direction that provides information on the cost of the service over a period of 20 seconds.

“This determination was made for the banks, and it was agreed between the Telecom companies and the banks and this adds to the cost of the service”.

“The service is being provided to the banks, who in turn provide this service to their customers, the billing should therefore should be corporate billing as against end user billing”.

“We don’t want end user billing, we want when the telcos provide these service to their customers, at the end of the day, they charge them for the service and pay the telcos in the form of corporate billing”, Danbatta explained.

With the theme: ‘Success factors and barriers to national broadband and digital economy aspirations’, he noted that there was a misunderstanding between the banks and the telcos and the USSD debt kept piling until it reached over N100billion.

“Even at that time the service was still being provided by the banks and the telcos were still being paid nothing”.

Despite the intervention of the immediate past minister of Communications and Digital Economy  Isa Pantami, things did not change until recently when the acting Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, governor intervened, recognising the merit of the service, that without it there will be no digital financial inclusion and the penetration of inclusion will not be where it is now, talking about 60-70% penetration.

“For once this issue has been addressed by the current CBN governor, there’s a meeting between him, the NCC, telcos and the banks where it has been estalished that the debts exist and going forward services have to be paid for by the banks”.

It is an important development for the industry that we have found an amicable resolution to the problem because we do not want to disrupt financial services in the country and we want to see the index or the penetration go even higher”.

“We want it to be ubiquitous, but we cannot do this without settling the legacy debt as well as paying for the service that is being provided.”

Reporting by: Theresa Igata