Ife Ogunfuwa

Nigerians continue to experience declined transactions on Point of Sales terminals all over the country despite new efficiency methods introduced by stakeholders in the banking industry.

Checks by our correspondent on Friday showed that payment on PoS terminals had a high failure rate of 15.33 per cent as the volume of failed transactions on the terminals stood at 66,441 as of 6.31pm.

The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System data also showed that Point of Sales’ transactions carried out by merchants and retailers in the country were 433,312 at the same time on Friday.

NIBSS had last week said measures had been taken to ensure efficiency in the electronic payment system and achieve shorter transaction time.

The acting Managing Director, NIBSS, Mr Niyi Ajao, had said, “The total turn-around-time had been configured at 15 seconds in agreement with banks and processors. However, delayed responses from issuers after this timeout in recent times could cause authorised debits not to return to the terminal before the set TAT.”

Ajao explained that the timeout was the total turn-around-time for a PoS transaction cycle from the time it was received from PoS to the time a response was sent back to the terminal.

Some of the remedial steps taken in March, he said, included the adjustment of the timeout to 20 seconds from 15 seconds on March 14, 2019, and the adjustment of the timeout to 45 seconds from 20 seconds on March 19, 2019.

Many bank customers have expressed concern over the recurrent failure of transactions on Point of Sales transactions.

Findings show that in most cases when the transactions on PoS terminals failed, banks customers were debited and the transactions were not reverted.

The bank customers who shared their disappointment with The PUNCH correspondent said getting a refund after failed transactions were tedious as complaints did not yield a positive response.

Meanwhile, bank customers carried out close to three million transactions on Nigeria Interbank Settlement System Instant Pay platform recorded on Sunday, live updates provided by the NIBSS have shown.

NIP, which is an online real-time product that facilitates instant digital payment of bills on an account, hit exactly 2,898,881 transactions as of 7.31pm on Sunday.

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