Nigeria Mobile Operators To Bar Text Service for Banks Over $259 Million Debt (bloomberg.com) 3
Mobile-phone operators in Nigeria including MTN Group and Airtel Africa will stop providing dedicated text message services to banks until the lenders pay 120 billion naira ($259 million) in arrears. From a report: The operators will disconnect the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data based on their contracts with the lenders, Gbenga Adebayo, chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria said in a telephone interview on Monday. Some banks will be disconnected as early as today, he said. The service is crucial for the poor in Africa's most-populous nation, where as many as 40% don't have bank accounts. USSD is used for financial transactions such as transfers, bill payments and airtime recharges. For two years, Nigeria's mobile network operators and banks haven't been able to agree on the appropriate USSD pricing model, the mode of collection and liability for unremitted fees from the lenders. The telecom operators say arrears have risen from 42 billion naira in 2021. The industry regulator and the Central Bank of Nigeria intervened in the dispute that year leading to an agreement for a flat fee of 6.98 naira per transaction.
Highway robbery (Score:3, Interesting)
That is about a cent and a half per message. Which I was told a while back, costs the operators on the order of about that much per ten thousand. No wonder the banks are balking.
Kinda weird to see at the one hand "people need this service because they don't have bank accounts" and on the other hand "the banks are servicing this". So they're bank accounts without bank accounts, what?
But it is kinda cute to see the country's foremost electronic payment system shut down over a payment issue. What if all card transactions in your country would shut down over a trade fee dispute?
Cash is still king. Best not let anyone pry it from your hand while they're still warm.
Does this mean (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The banks did receive numerous warning calls that "your service will be disconnected with 24 to 48 hours", but they just hung up when they heard the accent.