Stakeholders’ to meet next month on how to deepen PoS penetration
In the drive for digital banking and seamless transactions, Point of Sale (PoS), ATM and transfers using mobile phones are key models, but in recent times, their usage is dropping, especially the PoS.
Accordingly, the Managing Director, Global Accelerex Limited, Tunde Ogungbade, has set December 5, date for the quarter-four ‘PoS Innovation Summit’ where experts are expected to proffer solutions to penetration.
In an interview, he said the summit will attempt to promote and educate Nigerians on the necessary adoption and growth of PoS as a cashless payment channel for businesses in Nigeria.
Ogungbade argued that “PoS, outside cash has been the adopted payment channel, and we owe it to Nigerians to sustain the security of their transactions. It is essential for us to come up with novel ideas to growth and adoption off cashless payments.”
“One of the major determining factors that influence the choice of consumers when making payments was also the issue of security, therefore, the industry has a responsibility to sustain soundness of the payment systems.
“Even as Nigeria has recorded about 80 per cent of transactions in retail shops carried out on PoS terminals, we have only 150,000 terminals in circulation compared to a country like Brazil, which has almost same features like Nigeria, but they have about 1.5million PoS terminals in circulation. There is need to innovate and encourage our consumers to continue to use these platforms, especially the PoS terminals to transact.”
“In a country like Angola where the GDP is small compared to Nigeria, they record a million transactions on PoS terminals per day, while we do not even record up to 500,000 transactions per day in Nigeria, because of the deficit in PoS terminals.
Ogungbade disclosed that although newer payments options are being introduced daily, PoS still records the highest number of transactions for retail payments and “so the security of the platform is very necessary. It is not about card alone, the PoS can do Mcash and other things. Even in the foreseeable future, PoS will still be relevant”.
However, since the introduction of the platform, there have been a set of observed challenges hobbling its speedy penetration.
Top among the problems include inadequate investments by operators, skepticism on the side of users and instability of networks at the point of use.
