The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has officially announced that the eNaira is now fully integrated with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS)
The integration with Nigeria’s payments backbone, NIBBS Instant Payments (NIP), means users can now transfer funds from their eNaira wallet to any bank account of their choice in Nigeria.
Launched and developed by Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) in 2011, NIP is an account-number-based online realtime Inter-Bank payment solution.
According to NIBSS, Nigerians’ real-time transactions surged year-on-year by 94.7% to $3.7 billion in 2021.
The system, which has already served a 1.4 billion transactions volume in the first 4 months of 2022, is relied upon by banks to provide more efficient services across a wide array of points, including:
- Internet banking
- Bank branches
- Kiosks
- Mobile apps
- Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD)
- Point Of Sale (POS)
- Automated Teller Machine (ATM)
By integrating eNaira to this system, merchants and consumers with bank accounts shall be able to transact eNaira with any bank account within the country.
To use the feature, CBN is advising users to visit their Google Playstore (Android) or Apple App store (iOS) and update their eNaira Speed wallet or simply login to their wallet via the web at https://mywallet.enaira.gov.ng
Below are some stats about the eNaira wallet:
- 840,000 eNaira wallet downloads
- 270,000 active wallets
- 252,000 consumer wallets
- 17,000 merchant wallets
- 200,000 transactions
- $9.3 million in transaction volume
The second phase of the project wants to integrate innovation and offline channels as the Central Bank predicts 8,000,000 subscribers by the end of that phase.
The eNaira is the first central bank digital currency (CBDC) to go live in Africa and one of the first globally to do so as well. Its success, or failure, is likely going to set a precedent for other African countries, some of which have already started benchmarking their own CBDCs on the eNaira.
