Five years after Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) launched its Cash-less Nigeria project to reduce the amount of physical cash circulating in the economy, it is finally catching on. Data from Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) showed a significant uptick in the use of Point of Sale (PoS) terminals for payments last year. Total transaction volume from January to November 2016 increased 65% against all of 2015. The value of PoS transactions have doubled between 2014 and 2016. CBN hopes its cash-less policy will curb the “negative consequences” of frequent use of cash—the high cost of handling cash for banks and enabling corruption. Given Nigeria’s long-running problems with corruption, the cash-less policy is focused on creating electronic paper trails to make fraud-related payments easily detectable. Read more: qz.com
