NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

The lack of generally accepted proofs of formal identification required to assist service providers navigate KYC (Know Your Customer) concerns has been identified as a major drawback to the success of mobile money operations in Nigeria, according to a new report released by Lafferty Group and obtained by BusinessDay on Tuesday.

The report says that when this situation is combined with the need for secure authorisation mechanisms to enable financial services providers manage risk, the result is a very low uptake of mobile money services, confined largely to those who already have bank accounts.

This also implies that the vast unbanked majority in Nigeria remains so, and the current mobile money offerings do very little to address this.