PoS operators’ now buy old, new notes at filling station, restaurants
Whereas several Point-of-Sale (PoS) operators have closed their shops due to the scarcity of new and old naira notes, smarter ones have resorted to visiting filling stations and big restaurants in the evenings to mop up their daily sales by buying their cash and paying them via PoS.
Investigations by Business Hilights show that PoS operators do this in the nights and sell the cash at high rates to frustrated Nigerians who could not bear the hassles at ATMs and banking halls.
Checks show that in Lagos, people pay N1,500 for N10,000 and N3,000 for N20,000 (old notes)
In an interview, the National Chief Aggregating Officer of the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria (AMM&BAN), Hussein Olanrewaju, disclosured that the impact of the ongoing shortage of new and old naira notes had worsened the plight of their members.
While noting that agents should be given preferential treatment in access to the new notes, he lamented that some Nigerians had taken advantage of the situation to charge unreasonable fees. He said, “Operators are licensed bodies that provide platforms which agents leverage on. Currently, agents do not have any preferential treatment to deliver this service, hence, more than 50 per cent of agent shops have been closed down as we speak. “Some agents, however, go extreme to buy these monies and those who do not, move from one ATM point to another incurring lot of cost in the process which will also reflect on the service charge. “It’s worthy to note that some Nigerians have taken advantage of this situation to charge people unreasonable charges.”
