Mobile Money Agents Decry High R ate of Decline PoS Transactions in August

MOBILE money and banking agents at the hinterland have decried high rate of decline transactions they experienced last month compared to other months.

Some of the agents that spoke with Nigeria Communications week lamented that about 50 per cent of their Point of Sale terminal transactions in the month under review where declined, heightening lack of confidence in the reliability of the use of PoS in the agency banking business.

Fasasi Sarafadeen Atanda, managing director, Partner de Ecosystem - an agent network management company, said: “almost 50 per cent of our PoS transactions failed in the August and the implication of this situation is dwindling customer trust. I think this was caused by switching and card processing factors. We look forward to a better service in September.”

Olowu Babs Azeez, chief executive officer, OBAT Global Investment, corroborated Atanda on downtime experienced by agents last month. “That could be true because I could remember NIBSS and Interswitch was down certain time. Although some agents that are not on the same switch trunk were having successful transactions.

Explaining the major cause of decline PoS transactions especially at the hinterland, Babatunde Obrimah, chief operating officer, Fintech

Association of Nigeria, said that decline in PoS transactions are mostly network issues. “So if local network is not stable transactions are not likely to even get to NIBSS which is the aggregator.

“I think investigation has to start with Telecommunications services. Not impossible that with more people working from home, there is an increase in usage putting pressure on

existing infrastructures.

“So, I think we need to increase and upgrade existing infrastructures such that if network is adequate, transactions can be consummated.

“Agents need to also document these declines so that the data is made available to NIBSS and they should be able to track and confirm if the transactions actually got to their network or not. Unless we are sure of where the problem lies, it may be unfair to blame NIBSS as the problem,” he said.

Emmanuel Agha, managing director, Innovectives- a SuperAgent in the financial inclusion ecosystem, attributed decline in transaction with a PoS device to some factors such as when the customer did not put the right parameter as required by the device, these include wrong Personal Identification Number or customer account number.

“More so, there could also be a decline in transaction when the customer’s bank cannot be reach, this has to do with connectivity issues that is provided by telecommunications operators,” he added.