The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN has pegged the maximum daily transactions through mobile phone- Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) at N10
The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN has pegged the maximum daily transactions through mobile phone- Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) at N100,000. The implementation of the policy starts June 1. Due to absence of set rules on USSD transactions, many commercial banks allow various limits, ranging from N100,000 to N500,000 and above in some cases, depending on customers’ risk absorption levels. This has exposed many customers’ transactions to high risk, with billions of naira lost to fraudsters.
The new framework signed by CBN Director, Banking & Payments System Department, ‘Dipo Fatokun said vast applications of the USSD technology, in terms of available services have raised the issue of the risks inherent in the channel. The USSD technology is a protocol used by the GSM network to communicate with a service provider’s platform. It is a session based, real time messaging communication technology, which is accessed through a string, which starts normally with asterisk (*) and ends with a hash (#). It is considered cost effective, more user-friendly, faster in concluding transactions, and handset agnostic.
The framework noted concerns on the likely exposure of CBN approved entities to the possible breaching of the USSD accessed financial services in view of likely vulnerabilities in the technology and the ever growing threats.
