The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has directed fintech companies to stop onboarding new customers until further notice. The President of the Bank Customers Association of Nigeria, Uju Ogubunka, backed the CBN’s directive to suspend new account opening on the affected platform.
The fintech companies affected are Opay, Palmpay, Kuda bank and Moniepoint. Representatives from the companies confirmed that CBN’s directive is related to the allegations of accounts being used for illicit foreign exchange transactions.
Representatives from the companies observed that the directive could be misguided since most of the affected accounts were associated with commercial banks.
“I can confirm that 90% of the accounts implicated in the illicit forex transactions are with commercial banks, and only 10% are with fintechs. Why then has the CBN not extended this directive to the commercial banks? We face a widespread issue here, and targeting fintechs seems like an unfair focus on the more vulnerable targets,” one of the sources explained.
Meanwhile, in a ruling delivered on April 24, a federal high court in Abuja has granted an interim order to the EFCC to freeze at least 1,146 bank accounts belonging to individuals and companies over “unauthorised foreign exchange” transactions.
Upon analyzing the 1,146 accounts frozen by the EFCC, it was found that 90 percent of the affected accounts are managed by commercial banks, with the remaining 10 percent attributed to fintechs.
