Commercial banks commend customers' compliance

Commercial banks in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have commended their customers’ effort to meet the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Bank Verification Number (BVN) registration deadline of Oct. 31.

Most of the banks said their customers had greatly complied with the directive and would be able to meet the deadline designated by the apex bank.

Some of the banks visited by a Correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) are First Bank of Nigeria, Guarantee Trust Bank, Diamond Bank, Zenith Bank and United Bank for Africa (UBA).

At UBA in Garki, a bank official who spoke anonymously said that about 85 per cent of the customers had complied with the BVN registration.

According to him, the customers in the Diaspora had also complied with the directive since the bank had branches outside the country.

Another official at the Diamond Bank in Area 3, who preferred not to be mentioned, also told NAN that majority of its customers had done the registration.

"It is obvious that most of our customers have complied with the registration because the stand designated for the registration has only few customers waiting to be attended to. There was no queue in the bank for a while now and even some of our customers who were sick, in spite of their conditions came to do the registration,’’ he said.

A customer at the First Bank plc, Central Area, Miss Angela Okih, said that she had been to the bank several times for the BVN registration but was not able to do it because of crowd.

She said: "Today I came to the bank and there is no crowd. I think most people have already done the registration because I was attended to immediately and I have got my number."

However, another customer at the Zenith Bank, Mr Timothy Chukwuemeka, told NAN that he had been to the bank several times for the registration but was unable to get through.

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"Each time l come to the bank, they tell me there is network failure and my registration has not been completed and this has lingered for a long time. I am at the bank today and the bank is still complaining of the same network issue and l have not done the registration. This is very annoying because I am a businessman and l have to leave my business to come here every time only to spend all my day and not achieve anything. I hope the management will do something about this because issues like this might make them lose most of their customers,’’ Timothy said.

NAN recalls that CBN extended the deadline for the registration from June 30 to Oct. 31 to enable those who were unable to register previously, including those in the Diaspora to comply.

The introduction of BVN, according to the CBN, is targeted at addressing cybercrime, ATM fraud and other kinds of financial frauds as well as safeguard customers’ funds.

Aside this, the BVN will also strengthen the current KYC guidelines and allow banks to have more confidence in giving out loans.

The BVN allows for the financial history of a customer to be stored at a central location and accessed by other banks who seek information about that customer.