Having 24 commercial banks operating in Nigeria, there are possibilities of growing incidents of fraud with accounts having no BVN in different banks such like Zenith Bank, Access Bank, UBA, First bank and other financial institutions.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has resulted in closure of such accounts not linked to BVN as that could amount to avenue for fraudsters to operate.
The Chief Risk officer from the Risk Management department of CBN, Blaise Irebor disclosed this at the Prembly Compliance Breakfast Dialogue on Thursday April 6th, 2023.
He said the aim and objectives us to clean up the sector and reduce the incidence of fraud
That the apex bank has been working with the Nigerian inter-bank settlement system (NIBSS) to address growing incidence of fraud in the sector.
NIBSS has earlier revealed that there are only 57.01 million registered bvn numbers out of 191.4 million bank accounts in the country with 133.5 million active
He said, ” The account is dominated by digital banks or fintech firms and often lacks BVN linkage which makes it easy entry for hackers
“Some banks especially digital ones may not meet regulatory requirements thereby leaving a loophole for fraudulent activities.
“Lastly, hackers can exploit any vulnerability to gain access to bank accounts.”
To this end, Irebor maintained that the apex bank aim was working to improve agency banking to enable agents register BVN which will help to move Tier 1 accounts to Tier 2 accounts respectively.