Apex bank intervenes with $370.9 million in forex market

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Tuesday carried out wholesale interventions in the interbank foreign exchange market by providing 370.9 million dollars to 23 banks to meet the visible and invisible requests by customers.

The Acting Director of Corporate Communications, Mr Isaac Okorafor said the bank’s intermediation in the market was aimed at easing the pressure of access to foreign exchange by Nigerians.

He said that the CBN offered 500 million dollars for sale to the banks, but not all of them provided enough naira backing to pay fully for their respective bid amounts.

Okorafor said that the qualified bids for dollars ranged from N315 to N360.

He said seven banks received full allotments of their respective bids valued at 37.5 million each, while other banks received allotments ranging from 46, 512 dollars to 15.57 million dollars.

He said also that the CBN had also made spot sales of 1.5 million dollars to four banks totaling six million dollars.

“The Bank also offered 41 million dollars for sale out of which 35 million dollars was taken up for the payment of school fees, medical bills and personal and business travel allowances,” he said.

Okorafor assured that the bank would continue to make interventions based on qualified bids from the banks on the requests of their customers.

He said that the bank was more than ever ready to support the inter-bank market by ensuring liquidity and transparency to guarantee efficiency in the foreign exchange market.

Okorafor urged all market participants to contribute their patriotic quota to assist in ensuring that the new measures by the CBN would guarantee the steadiness of the financial market.

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It will be recalled that the CBN introduced new actions on foreign exchange aimed at easing access to foreign exchange for personal and business travel as well as educational and medical fees, among others.

As part of its new policy action, the CBN also directed all to open foreign exchange retail outlets at major airports as soon as logistics would permit them to do so.