branch manager with UBA, many Nigerians in Diaspora

 money in my bank account to their accounts. And since then I abandoned the account because I don’t have any reason to go to the bank again. I don’t want to encounter such and since then the bank has been calling me but I don’t have their time.”

According to a branch manager with UBA, many Nigerians in Diaspora have abandoned their bank accounts due to fear of find fraudsters. “We discovered that a lot of customers living abroad refused to enrol for the Biometric Verification Number (BVN) because they don’t want anybody to use their account to commit fraud. They will tell you I will come and do it when I return to the country. So the account becomes inactive.”

The BVN effect

The BVN according to bankers is another reason why some customers have abandoned their accounts. “A lot of the inactive ban house k accounts have BVN issues,” a top official of NIBSS confirmed to Financial Vanguard on condition of anonymity.

Confirming this in response to Financial Vanguard enquiries, GTBank said: “There is a close tie between number of accounts that are inactive and number of accounts that do not have BVN. In addition, inaccurate information supplied by customers leads to data matching business issues during BVN enrolment”.

A branch manager in one of the tier-1 banks, however, said the reason some bank accounts have not been linked to BVN is because they were primarily opened and used for fraudulent activities. “The customers abandoned the accounts because they don’t want the activities in those accounts traced to them”, she said.

Banks fight back

Financial Vanguard investigations, however, discovered that most banks are not comfortable with customers abandoning their bank accounts and hence are making efforts to reduce the number of inactive bank accounts in their books.

“It is part of our performance indices”, a branch manager in a Tier-1 bank told Financial Vanguard.

“In my bank, we don’t use the six months criteria of the CBN. Rather we use three months. Once the customer does not operate the account for three months, it is classified inactive, and we begin to take measures to encourage the customer to operate the account. We are also given quarterly target or threshold for inactive bank accounts,” she said.

To check incidence of inactive bank accounts, FirstBank said it has created a team to follow up on inactive account holders. This is in addition to digitisation of account opening process and creation of convenience for on-site BVN enrolment.

Other measures introduced by the bank include: automation of access to loan facilities like salary overdraft, personal loan against salary; and creation of account opening