Emmanuel Ojukwu
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced that mobile money operators, and fintech firms like Moniepoint, Kuda Bank, OPay, and Palmpay, will resume enrolling new customers in another couple of months.
This was disclosed by the CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso on Tuesday during the 295th Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting in Abuja, where the MPC increased the interest rate from 24.75 percent to 26.25 percent.
Cardoso mentioned that the CBN has engaged with many of these mobile operators to emphasize the need to strengthen their operations. To combat money laundering and illicit financial flows, the apex bank has introduced remedial measures to help the sector tighten up on onboarding and managing its existing clientele base.
The CBN governor further expressed confidence that as time goes on, and hopefully in another couple of months, the financial sector will go back into what they’ve been known to do before, but certainly with a much stronger regulatory framework.
Recall that in April this year, the apex bank instructed fintech firms to pause the onboarding of new customers, a move that has been seen as a clampdown on the financial sub-sector.
The affected fintech companies were reported to have accounts being used for illicit foreign exchange transactions.
On April 26, the Central Bank and the National Security Agency (NSA) held talks with representatives of the affected fintech, with the CBN stating that a lot of crypto traders were leveraging the fintech platforms to disrupt the FX market.
