United Bank for Africa (UBA) has emerged as the bank with the most biometric enrolments among other Nigerian banks.
Data from the Nigeria Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) as of the end of last week showed hat UBA was leading the industry with a count of 382,778 in the Bank Verification Number (BVN).
UBA, as at December 5, UBA crossed the 400,000 threshold, followed by Access Bank with 230,083, while First Bank came third with a BVN count of 228,209.
Guaranty Trust Bank and Diamond Bank have a BVN counts of 212,001 and 114,101, respectively, came in at fourth and fifth.
With this tally, UBA has become the first bank ever to achieve the 400,000 registrations, and indeed the first in each multiple of 100,000 since commencement to date.
The bank is currently doing 25 percent of total industry enrolment to date to stay ahead of second and third banks doing about 15 percent each.
Thus, the top three banks are doing about 55 percent, while the rest account for 45 percent in the industry wide count which stands at 1,540,580.
Recently, at the visit of Gunther Mull, CEO/managing director, Dermalog Identification Systems (DIS) GmbH, to Phillips Oduoza, CEO, UBA plc, he acknowledged the efforts of UBA in the exercise.
Dermalog, a Hamburg-based company, is the leading global company in the field of bio-payments with the largest number of biometric patents. It is also the technical partner to Chams plc., which drives the BVM project in Nigeria The BVN exercise is aimed at boosting financial inclusion.
The initiative will also enhance security of funds of bank customers, shorten transaction time, and minimise use of cash, cheques and cards.
The exercise will serve to ensure the delivery of a robust solution that will offer reliable user authentication to banks and other financial institutions for the benefit of millions of banked, under banked and unbanked Nigerians.
The banking industry biometric KYC project was necessitated by the absence of a central and standardised identity database with supporting infrastructure for identification and verification of customers in Nigeria’s fast growing financial markets.
More so, lack of standardised identification system also deny 34.9 million Nigerian adults – about 39.7 percent of the adult population – access to basic financial services.
The project will improve access of millions of Nigerian adults to a range of secure, convenient and high quality financial products and services such as savings, credit, insurance, payments and pension, which were denied adults in the low- income segment.
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