Nigeria gears up for payments 21 February 2014 Nigeria Reporter: Georgina Lavers
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The Central Bank of Nigeria’s is attempting to gear up the country’s payments system by going live on SWIFT.
The African country has adopted SWIFT for the infrastructure of Nigeria’s high-value payments. SWIFT’s real-time gross settlement system will support improvements in interoperability of the country’s financial infrastructure, helping to improve settlement security and eliminate risk.
SWIFT connectivity ensures Nigeria complies with global standards for critical payment infrastructure as set out by the Bank for International Settlements, providing the Nigerian financial system with a future-proof payments infrastructure and helping Nigeria to integrate with other financial markets in the region and globally.
Dipo Fatokun, director of banking and payments system department at the Central Bank of Nigeria, said: “The importance of the payments system in any market economy cannot be over-emphasised. In particular, the link between the efficiency of the payments system, the effectiveness with which monetary policy is conducted, the soundness of the financial sector and, indeed, the overall performance of the economy is very strong.”
“Thus, central banks the world over have more than cursory interest in the development of payments and settlement systems.”
Nigeria is the 20th country in Africa to adopt SWIFT for its domestic payments as well as its international payments infrastructure.
The move to SWIFT is an important step for the country within the West African Monetary Zone, a group of six countries (The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone) that plan to introduce a single currency and use a common payment system in order to boost regional trade and investment.
Hugo Smit, head of Africa South at SWIFT, said: “By ensuring that Nigeria’s infrastructure is interoperable with both regional and international platforms, the move to SWIFT means that the Nigerian financial community will be easily able to interoperate within the West African Monetary Zone as this regional harmonisation project matures.”
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