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

Friday, September 6, 2013

Two years have passed since a mobile money service was deployed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and it still has yet to catch on with the masses. According to a recent poll by the Nigerian research company NOI, only 6 out of 10 Nigerians know about the service (59 percent), and of that number only 13 percent are using it.

Even more discouraging is that 93 percent of the mobile money adopters are using it in conjunction with an existing bank account, and that the remaining 7 percent had a bank account, but operated it separately. That implies that the target audience—the unbanked—is missing out entirely.