Banks shun Nigeria Cyber identity, use foreign domains

Money deposit banks are still reluctant to register their domains on .ng, Nigeria’s Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), preferring instead foreign domains, despite several years of lobbying and campaigns by Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) the custodian of Nigeria’s ccTLD.

As at today, only Fidelity bank has identified with the country’s identity on the cyber space, according to Edith Udeagu, chief operating officer, NIRA.

She told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that the situation is not good for the country’s identity on the cyber space where organizations identify with their parent country’s domain name such as .uk for United Kingdom banks and .za for South African banks.

“Banks that register their website on .com or other foreign domain don’t have control over them because; it is not under our jurisdiction. You don’t have easy access to the regulator if there is any issue such as cloning of website among others.

“More so, renewal fees are done with foreign exchange which is capital flight. In local targeting and search engine optimization; this will ensure your business appears whilst in the search for your type of business in our geographical region (Nigeria),” she added.

Udeagu noted that NiRA has embarked on several awareness campaigns targeting the banks to ensure that they are brought to .ng but that has not yielded any positive results.

Ike Nnamani, managing director, Demadiur systems, identified some of the reasons why banks are yet to change their websites to .ng to include the fact that most of them have already set up their website and customer relation information on .com before .ng became prominent which makes it difficult to change overnight.

“What needs to happen is gradual migration to .ng in such a way that there won’t be disruption of their services. They can set another website on .ng and redirecting visitors of their previous website to the .ng website,” he said.

He noted that there is lack of awareness on the part of the banks on how .ng will help the country over business interest as hosting on .ng help create global identity for the country as well as customer confidence.

“Websites with domain names associated with ccTLDs give visitors confidence as they are aware that ccTLDs are highly regulated. So using a .ng domain name gives credibility to a business. International customers prefer to deal with businesses that have the ccTLD domain names,” he added.