Nigerians are to pay N6.98 for every USSD transaction from now on- CBN

The Central Bank of Nigeria has announced that all Nigerians will now pay a charge of N6.98 for every Unstructured Supplementary Service (USSD) code generated for mobile banking transactions.

The collection of the new charge will commence from today, Tuesday, March 16, 2021.

This directive from CBN was contained in a statement, which read that all telecom customers that transact with bank USSD codes will now pay N6.98 per transaction to the network providers. But the payments will be received by the lenders on behalf of the network providers.

This new development came up as a result of the recent conflict between telecoms and banks, which resulted to these various network providers threatening to withdraw the service of banks.

Consequently, in order to resolve the issue between banks and network providers, the Body of Central Bank of Nigeria held a meeting with Nigeria Communications Commission, Deposit Money Banks, Association of Licensed Telecoms of Nigeria and the Association of Telecommunications Companies on Nigeria on March 15, 2021.

It was during this meeting that the new charge of N6.98 was agreed upon by all members of the meeting, however the implementation process has not been agreed upon. But the new charge is expected to replace the former billing used before the conflict.

A financial regulator confirmed that no matter of the amount of sessions done before a transaction is successful, the deducted won’t be greater than N6.98.