NIBSS upgrades systems for anticipated 100% rise in POS transactions

The Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement Systems says it has upgraded its systems to accommodate an anticipated 100% rise in point-of-sale transactions.

Addressing journalists on Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters, Niyi Ajao, NIBSS acting managing director, said the recent glitches experienced in POS transactions were due to an attempted upgrade.

“In 2018, we had 285 million POS transactions and that was the highest ever recorded in the country,” he said.

“We are expecting that the figure will double in 2019 because we had half of 2018’s figure in 2017 and that was why we embarked on an upgrade of our systems.

“A system glitch happened in course of trying to upgrade capacity and unfortunately for us, other players in value chain had issues around that period and that compounded the problem.

“We started noticing the issues around December. The failure rate which was previously at 13% climbed to around 16%.”

According to the acting NIBSS boss, the agency has been able to stabilise the system after meeting with other stakeholders in the payment systems value chain.

“Effective from March 22, POS transaction time-out period would be increased to 45 seconds from the present 15 seconds to reduce the failure rate.

“Banks have also agreed to dedicate a particular period of the day to treating reversal complaints to clear the backlog.

“We hear the complaints of Nigerians and we assure them that it would be resolved with the next few days.”

In recent times, there had been complaints about increased failure rates of POS transactions and the increased time in reversing failed transactions.