CBN urges sustained efforts against e-fraud

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) at the weekend, in Lagos, unveiled the 2014 yearly report of the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NEFF), with a call for sustained innovative efforts against cyber crime.

The NeFF is a platform to proffer solutions towards addressing frauds arising from the increased adoption of electronic payments in the industry.

Speaking at the event, the CBN Director, Banking and Payment System, Dipo Fatokun, said it has become imperative that an effective mechanism for receiving and responding promptly to fraud alerts be set up within the banking industry, towards managing and reducing successful electronic payments frauds.

According to him, these are articles that will sensitise, educate and enlighten the readers as well as open the eye of the public on trends in the electronic fraud and how they can be avoided. “But one good thing about the industry is that you can always be proactive, think ahead in designing a product or service.

You can think ahead and consider ways of ensuring that fraudsters do not succeed in the new product or service that you are deploying’” he stated.

He pointed out that the value and volume of fraud globally is on the increase, saying that in Nigeria we would count ourselves to be one of those that have been fortunate somehow.

“Nigeria is not doing badly compared to other countries in the world when it comes to cyber crime and the issue of e-fraud and of course, the recommendations are that as user of e-banking or e-banking product, we must be aware of the tactics of fraudsters such as fishing e-mail, text messages that’s meant to capture data so that they can have access to your account,” he stated.

Fatokun said the mobile money space as we are aware started in Nigeria just about four years ago in 2011, and currently we have licensed about 21 mobile money operators.

He noted that It is not right to say that we are not making progress, but it will be right to say that our expectations on mobile money has not fully been met and probably because we are a little bit ambitious in setting the targets.

“Each transaction in mobile money runs into billion, in fact, more than ₦5 billion every year, but what we have noticed is that most of the transactions in mobile money is either subscriptions, payment for subscriptions and remittances, maybe the mobile wallet sending money to account in the bank or account in the bank sending money to mobile wallet.

“What we have discovered that has led to the slow growth is the fact of the agency because for the mobile money to be successful, you must have agents. So the CBN did a research and came out with provisions on agency banking which the mobile money operators are keying into.

Just this year, we released another circular on super agent structure (SAS), such that companies can come up to provide super agent activities”, he noted. “The financial institutions will key into this, and of course, we expect that most of the telecommunication companies, if not all, will serve as super agents. And some of them have actually shown interests.

Two of them already have our approval on mobile principles to make their agent available for financial institutions for financial services. Once this is fully deployed, we will see a great uptake in the use of mobile money,” he noted.

Also speaking at the event, the Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Diamond Bank, Uzoma Dozie, said cyber crime has become worrisome and dominating global financial discourse, as the perpetrators even get more sophisticated in approach. For him, the underline ideology for cyber security is to provide relevant strategy and framework against cyber threat, as well as secure the business in the advent of attack and nurture the same cyber environment.

However, Dipo added that in order not to fall in the hand of fraudsters, we must put these recommendations in place and be careful on how we display our information, most especially our bank information or card information.