The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has renewed its cash reward incentive for using digital remittances, according to a bank memo addressed to all deposit money banks, international money transfer operators (IMTOs) and the general public.
The incentive plan, called the “CBN Naira 4 Dollar Scheme,” offers remittance recipients five naira for every dollar sent through a CBN-licensed IMTO. Remittance users can collect the rewards as cash or transfer them to a bank account.
The incentive was originally launched on March 8 and was set to expire on May 8. The Wednesday (May 5) memo extends the program “until further notice.” The program’s details, as well as compliance expectations, remain the same in this extended period.
The incentive aims “to sustain the encouraging increase in inflows of diaspora remittances into the country,” according to the original memo from March.
The pandemic has pushed digital transformations in nearly all industries and services, as physical commerce was virtually put on hold and the World Health Organization warned consumers of the sanitary concerns of using cash. The remittance space is one such industry that saw increased demand amid the pandemic, especially in its digital form, and has seen many of the largest financial services firms take their remittance offerings global.
“We are seeing that as we look at digital remitters reporting double-digit growth during this period,” Jay Wissema, director of expense management firm Volopa, told PYMNTS recently.
And as we push forward the digital shift, old-school international transaction methods can’t always keep up with the demand and the changing landscape, PYMNTS reported in a recent Smarter Payments Tracker. Legacy banking systems may be costly and may take too long to deliver a payment, the Tracker found, recommending that financial institutions (FIs) and FinTechs apply Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions to their remittance services.
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